Games Workshop, the legendary British miniature manufacturer and behemoth behind Warhammer (and its infinitely more popular sci-fi setting, Warhammer 40,000), is notoriously rigid and inflexible. In the nearly five decades since setting up shop, the firm has fiercely protected its extremely lucrative IP, working closely with licensees to ensure the universe’s relentlessly bleak lore remains in line with Imperial mandate. This is how we learned that developer Saber Interactive, in a truly humiliating blunder, managed to get the relative size and make of the ankle armour slightly wrong in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.
Speaking to IGN, chief creative officer Tim Willits described the level of scrutiny Games Workshop subjected the studio to: “When the guy that made the little Space Marine that sat on the table, he probably was not imagining them animating in a video game 45 years later. And let me tell you, that was hard to make. I mean, when you walk and run and fight as Titus, it feels so good. The ankle armour we had was the wrong size, and they told us that the ankle armour was wrong.”
IGN pulled at this fascinating thread, and Willits described a system Games Workshop has, which licensees run content and assets through, with dedicated employees working to offer feedback: “They will help steer. And even when we’re coming up with Tyranid attacks, they’re like, oh, that Tyranid doesn’t really attack like that, or that Chaos Marine, you can’t really have him do that. So we had to adjust things. We did push them a little bit.”