An Epic farewell

Games Workshop's decision to finally kill off Specialist games has prompted me to pick up the last few Epic models I really wanted before they are gone forever. I say forever, that isn't quite true as I'm sure there will be plenty of models traded around Ebay and at convention bring and buy sales for years to come.

I didn't need a lot, I have pretty extensive armies for Orks, Eldar and Space Marines with a few quirky extras including old Chaos models and Imperial Knights, but it was a nice opportunity to fill in a few gaps. Though it has had the disturbing tendency to drag me back for more. I've put in three separate orders so far. I have told myself that that is definitely it, but then I said that about the last two orders as well.

This sudden focus on Epic has reminded me that it is, more or less, the game that got me into wargaming in the first place. Hero Quest and Warhammer 40,000 are entitled to a considerable amount of the credit, but Epic was the first game I really built and army and the first Games Workshop only game (Hero Quest was a co-production with MB games) I owned. My first Games Workshop models was a box of Epic Orks. I ordered them because of the promise of hundreds of models, not realising how small they were.

Actually, in the early 1990s, Epic was a pretty good starting point for a new player. For a start, almost all the infantry, as well as some of the light vehicles, were available entirely in plastic and the early Epic boxes did contain a few hundred individual models. One or two boxes would easily cover all your infantry needs. In contrast to Warhammer or 40K, where you would often need four or five blisters to form a whole unit, Epic vehicle formations could be had in one or two (Games Workshop had a frustrating tendency to sell tanks in packs of two and require them to be used in groups of three). It was cheap to start an army, and it could be easily expanded in bits.

The drawback was the rules. In 1990, to get the full rules you needed two boxed sets, Space Marine and Adeptus Titanicus, the supplement book Codex Titanicus and about half a dozen White Dwarfs. But then I started out buying models I liked the look of and not worrying about rules. And the rules problem was fixed when second editon was released in 1991.

But the real draw for a ten year old was that Epic allowed you to build up armies that really looked like armies with hundreds of infantry, battalions of tanks and building sized giant robots. In contrast, Warhammer 40,000 armies of the time looked like little more than a couple of gangs.

Of course current Games Workshop marketing encourages players to build huge armies in 28mm scale and the range of tanks and huge things has certainly expanded. But Epic was the game that made massive battle seem affordable to at least one 10 year old.

The long slow death of Specialist Games

If a poster on The Miniature Page is to be believed, Games Workshop are finally in the process of retiring their Specialist games for good. This doesn't come as a huge shock, it had been rumoured for some time, they were never likely to retool them for Finecast and their abrupt termination of Warhammer Historical showed their complete lack of interest in anything outside of their core business. I am surprisingly unbothered, I have all the rules and models I could ever need for those games I actually play. Plus, their are plenty of good alternative sources of models for most of them. I am glad that I scooped up all the Inquisitor models I wanted while they were still available.

It's interesting that Games Workshop should be doing this just as Deadzone is doing so well on Kickstarter. It shows that, for all the accusations of copying Games Workshops MO, Mantic have a very different attitude to the games industry. As Games Workshop consolidates, Mantic expands and with the specialist games finally disappearing they could be in a good position to scoop up some disillusioned supporters.

It can be argued that consolidation makes sense. The argument is that there will only ever be a limited number of people interested in your product and by expanding too far you effectively compete with yourself. The money being spent on Mordheim or Epic should be spent on Warhammer and 40K. Games Workshop makes more money out of its core games and should focus on them.

The problem with this argument is, if you take it to extremes then Games Workshop should only produce a single box of Space Marines and focus on getting everyone to buy it. More seriously, they should certainly drop Warhammer and the Hobbit and focus on Warhammer 40,000 as it is their most popular game. That they don't suggests that they recognise, at least to some extent, that you can't force your customers into buying whatever you feel like selling.

Whether they have the balance right remains to be seen. In the short-term this is unlikely to make much difference. Most Specialist games players are hardcore veterans, long since disillusioned with Games Workshop and focusing their attention on other publishers models. It's unlikely that this will be the last straw that drives anyone away from Games Workshop. What will be worth watching is whether Mantic, or others, are able to take advantage of the apparent gap in the market. We have had Fantasy/Sci-Fi sports and Sci-Fi skirmish, should we be watching for Space combat, 54mm scale or 6mm scale in the near future?