Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop

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They expanded to include miniatures rules and eventually they started to expand horizontally into designing and manufacturing miniatures. In summary, if you have any interest in the history of GW and the men behind it then this is a must read.

My thanks to to Ian and Steve for sharing their memories; I’m now eagerly awaiting the followup just announced covering the Fighting Fantasy years. What amazes me is how many of the personalities involved in GW’ sphere of influence either came from, or moved onto, other projects and companies which I also love. Having read the first thirty or so pages of Dice Men I realise I need to tell things the way I remember them. In 1982 he co-wrote The Warlock of Firetop Mountain with Steve Jackson, the first title in the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series which went on to sell 20 million copies worldwide. In 1995 he led the merger of computer games company Domark with Eidos, the name behind the Tomb Raider computer games, where he is now Creative Director.You haven’t given any thought to finding anyone who could succeed him, and he knows that too, and your plan for how to keep him on side when he resigns the third time is to promise you’ll let him run the company, which is what he wanted to begin with. O livro é maravilhoso, qualidade ótima e item obrigatória pra quem gosta de saber mais sobre a história do hooby. Ultimately it’s hard to escape the idea that they just didn’t want it that much, and Ansell really did. Despite being one of the minds behind Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Bryan Ansell comes out of this history looking pretty mercenary.

I was intrigued enough by the premise to fund it and you can find my name in the back in the list of supporters, which feels like a disclosure I should make at the start of a review like this.

They make an effort to hold on to half their shares each, which is firmly rebuffed, and that’s that. Miniatures” there means other people’s; they have been selling miniatures, but they haven’t been making them. words (not that having pictures is a bad thing) and how much I get through when I sit down to read it.

The Men at this time are three blokes in a flat who really, really love games, and want to Do Games as a living and are grabbing at whatever they can think of to turn that dream into a reality; Livingstone himself describes it as “role-playing as businessmen engaged in the business of role-playing games. There’s a couple of hints as to why they seem so passive in letting it go; they’re overcommitted and exhausted, and Livingstone claims that they didn’t pay themselves much from GW and so the financial rewards of writing more of the now obviously-successful Fighting Fantasy books probably loomed large in the mind – why go through all the bother of the day job when someone else so clearly wanted to do it? An enjoyable trip down memory lane, full of nostalgic photos and details I was only dimly aware of as a nascent gamer in the 80's.If you’re into the GW artwork of that era there’s a bunch of that in here, and also personal photos from Livingstone and others on a range of subjects – GW’s various London offices, early Games Days, some holiday photos from Ian and Steve’s road trip around America that led to their first meeting with Gary Gygax, bits and pieces like that. The book is full of great photos, fun anecdotes, and a good insight into the UK side of the gaming industry and how much Ian and Steve struggled utterly in the early days, but were carried by belief and blagging. Other sections are like this too; often critical early figures appear in the narrative, disappear, re-appear, and then are finally introduced properly in a later chapter which deals with the particular subject they’re most relevant to. This is also a business environment alien to the modern age with no e-mail or IMs; for most of the time Ansell in Nottingham is going to be running things independently from Livingstone and Jackson in London and so by necessity he is going to be out of sight – and probably out of mind – for long stretches.