The Trouble with Oldhammer

Nostalgia, it’s a great thing, you can while away many hours looking back on things from the past fondly, basking in the warm reassuring glow of a less complicated time. 

Hobby nostalgia is a growing thing apparently, as the kids of the late 80s to mid-90s become adults, they look back at their childhood, when Games Workshop was the coolest shop in the world, that transported you to a fantasy realm full of treasures and adventure, before you realised they were a business that wanted your money, before you became a jaded, bitter adult.

Shaitan from the Oldhammer forum's
really cool Khorne Chaos Champion

Some take this nostalgia very seriously. They call themselves the Oldhammer community, and it has many admirable traits, they take the hobby in the spirit it was presented at the time, when the rules were a bit more slapdash, the armies weren’t as structured and the armies were smaller and made of lead. They want to play with models they loved as kids, playing the game as a friendly RPG-like experience as it was designed in the late 80s, they favour the late 80s 3^rd Edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle and the Rogue Trader Warhammer 40,000 rules, complicated tomes with a lot of mechanics and imbalances that overcomes that with the narrative driven, GM-led gameplay it suggests. They claim to appreciate a time when GW wasn’t afraid to be funny or satirical, saying today’s books are overly serious and po-faced.

These are all good and fine ideals, the models have an aesthetic that is easy to admire, they were all sculpted by hand, each model is an individual, made to be a particular person in a force, when a unit might have 10-20 models at most, and an army rarely had more than 50 models in it, this was a lot more feasible than with the modern editions. In effect, each character comes imbued with the personality by the sculptor, and a lot of the time, this really shows through. 

There are problems though, one is prevalent in almost all hobby related communities, an attitude that

ranges from distrust to outright hatred of Games Workshop. There is more though, there is a sense of superiority, that lead models are inherently better than today’s plastic and resin, that sculpting by hand is inherently better than the CAD and 3D prototyping assisted sculpting, that the rules were better when there weren’t as many inherent restrictions and while they claim to love the humour of the period, I’ve yet to see much of that humour manifest itself in their discussions.

Brand new Champion of Khone, similar
 but different, better? Thats subjective.

These aren’t universal truths, and they manifest themselves in massively silly ways. People decry every new model Games Workshop release, no matter the quality, out of hand. They compare models to older versions and claim the old ones have more “soul” or “character” or other such indefinable qualities, seemingly unaware or unable to admit the role that nostalgia plays in how they’re looking at the miniatures.

The Legio Cybernetic, original
80s Robots, cerified Oldhammer

I’ve seen people argue that the original Legio Cybernetica Robots, great models and really inspiring, are much better than the recent Forge World equivalents that were inspired by them. Maybe I’m bias, I never owned the original Robots, they weren’t in the game anymore when I started, thanks to some ridiculously complicated rules, but I just can’t see how anyone would argue with the idea that the Forge World ones aren’t just the same concept but done to a better standard.

The Castellax, the new version
of the Castellan

The Vorax is a reimagining of
 the Crusader

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, Oldhammer is just the Games Workshop/Wargaming hobby from when you were 10 until whenever a person you liked touched your genitals and you reassessed your priorities. It’s as simple as that, and that’s fine, just admit it and don’t let bitterness ruin yours, or other peoples, hobby.

The start of a downward spiral into madness.

Although this is mainly a blog about my painting progress, I thought I'd write a little about how I started in the hobby, this account is clouded by nostalgia and is about 20 years in the past, so is by no means an accurate reflection of reality.

There was a Games Workshop on Lord Street in Liverpool, it's a Sayers now, and what was once an Electronic Boutique, the constant next-door neighbour of Games Workshops everywhere at the time, was a Jessops until recently, who knows what it will be once they finally stop clutching on to a business that's failed, but when I was 10 years old, these were my favourite places in the world, that and the section of Virgin Megastore that had PC games and role playing books and stuff. (Odd, if you were to guess then which of those business would still be holding on in 2013, GW wouldn't be your first choice.) Anyway, EB was the first place I would want to go in town, I wasn't allowed a games console back then, mother didn't like the idea of them, but we had a PC and I'd play games on that, i loved Duke Nukem, Wolfstein 3D and Doom that my dad thought he'd hidden in a sub-directory and I would play NES and Super NES and Mega Drives whenever there was one available to me, but mainly I just liked to go to the shop to look at the pictures on the boxes, I had no money, so I'd never be able to buy anything anyway.

One day I was walking to EB, I must have been with my Mum, we walked past Games Workshop and through the doorway I saw a cardboard standup of what I now know to be an Imperator Titan, the image taken from the front of the EPic boxed set, i had to go and look closer, , when I learnt that this 5 foot tall standee was a picture of a robot the size of a sky scraper, it's gun barrels as big as a house, I was hooked. I remember being absolutely overwhelmed by it all, guessing what it was all about from pictures and overheard conversations, it was the coolest thing in the world.

excitedly telling my younger brothers all about it the next day, I think we were away as a family in Edinburgh, on camp beds in a hotel room, as I explained to them how Space Marines were 7 foot tall and had massive armour and giant guns, they were all different colours and that showed their rank, the next day, walking through the streets, we pretended to be Space Marines, I was the red one so I was in charge, my brothers were blue and yellow.

For weeks after I begged to go there again, and eventually, my parents relented, they phoned the shop and asked how i could start this game, that day they took me to the shop and a madsive game was going on, it felt like there were 50 people around the board, commanding massive armies, i was given a squad of Catachan jungle fighters and told how to move them and shoot with them, I moved them into a bunker and the next turn blew up a Rhino with the Missle launcher. It was amazing and i wanted more.

A few weeks later my brothers and I went there again and my parents bought us the metal devastator squad, which we thought were the coolest models ever, and we were sat down at a little table covered in amazing models and shown how to paint, obviously looking back, no one told us to thin the paints, but we loved them, to us, they looked exactly how they did on the box. It progressed from there, we got more space marines and then the boxed sets for Christmas one year, I would spend hours at a time reading all the cards from Dark Millennium. I didn't have many friends back then, which I am sure is a constant amongst people my age who liked the hobby.

Eventually I would start Secondary school, Where I would finally meet other kids who played the game that I wasn't related to, we'd go to the art department at lunch time and play huge games, or try to, the hour we had for lunch wasn't even enough time for a turn of second edition Warhammer 40,000, after a few years, the lack of money, burgeoning interest in computer games and girls and beer led me away from the hobby, I still checked up on things and looked in the window at new models whenever I went past, but I didn't have any models or paints or interest in spending what little money I got a month on more.

It was years later, I think I was about 24, j hadn't done much in the way of hobby, I had gotten a few of my better painted models out of the box and put them on a shelf and had looked around at the newest things, some new Ork models caught my eye, I'd always loved Orks and played Gorkamorka with my brothers had been the most fun I'd had with the model hobby, so I looked around and ordered some things online, I didn't want to go into the shop itself, but yeah, I got some paints and some orks and I turned out to be a lot better than I remember, so I kept it up, every 6 months or so, I'd paint a few orks or a trukk or something, I didn't buy very much at all, I started reading the novels and getting involved in threads on Something Awful, I would visit the shop every now and then for new paints or the odd model, but wouldn't stay and talk to any of the weirdos.

Until I went in one time and ran into people I knew, suddenly this wasn't a lonely hobby that I was ashamed of, which was about a year ago and it lead me to where I am now.