These days, Warhammer has a pretty solid rep as far as video games are concerned. You’ve got Space Marine and its sequel, the revived legacy of the Dawn of War series, new projects like the Total War games, and even smaller experiences like Dark Tide or Boltgun. There was quite a time before that refinement where it felt like Games Workshop would hand out the Warhammer licenses to anyone who even glanced in the company’s general direction, leading to a whole lot of awful and awful-boring junk.
But before that? Now that was the age of the Warhammer video game.
The late ’90s and early aughts really saw Warhammer—both in its Fantasy Battles form and as Warhammer 40K—make its mark on the world of PC gaming. Even before the first Dawn of War, we had tactical classics like Chaos Gate and Shadow of the Horned Rat, or predecessors to the hits we see today like Mark of Omen paving the way for Total War: Warhammer. And for those who leaned more towards just blowing stuff up instead of strategy, there were classic shooters like Fire Warrior giving us perspectives outside of the typical Space Marine view we often got.
For quite some time, trying to play a lot of these games on modern PC hardware has been quite fraught. But that’s about to change, at least for PC gamers on Steam, with the arrival of a new Warhammer Classics collection.
Including almost 30 games overall, from the recent anniversary editions of the first two Dawn of War to old-school classics like Rites of War, 12 of the games are returning to Steam for the first time in years, and seven are making their first debuts on the storefront outright. Here are the seven games making their debut in full:
- Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat (1995)
- Final Liberation: Warhammer Epic 40,000 (1997)
- Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate (1998)
- Warhammer: Dark Omen (1998)
- Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War (1999)
- Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior (2003)
- Warhammer: Mark of Chaos (2006)
We might be getting some great new Warhammer games in the here and now, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to look back and see how far the franchise has come in the years since, at least away from the tabletop and in the virtual realm. As a noted Eldar fan, I’ll be booting up Rites of War quicker than you can say Baharroth, Cry of the Wind.
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