There’s not much I remember from 1996, I was 10 – I remember quite a lot about Euro ’96 and England getting knocked out, I’m pretty sure I cried. I can just about remember not sleeping a whole night at a friends birthday party due to playing Tekken and watching Stephen Kings ‘It’ then falling asleep into my dinner the next day. Finally for my birthday I got ‘Dizzy Heights’ by Lightning Seeds – absolutely shite.

The event I most clearly remember doing is buying my first copy of White Dwarf from the newsagents in our village – a few of the older lads in my street (all of them actually) played Warhammer 40k to various levels so it made sense that I start myself to avoid getting my head kicked in. I was shit at football even though I loved playing it so this was my first real introduction to something that kids were interested in that wasn’t football or video games.

In this article I’m going to talk you through some of my favourite parts of this issue and why it drew me into the Warhammer universe so far I’m still here 16 years later. FYI that most of it will be nonsense and is not exactly an in depth analysis of the issue.

The first thing that strikes me about the cover of this issue is how colourful it is, the only magazines I can think of that had more colours at the time were Shoot & Match. It is literally an assault on the retinas which I imagine was awesome when I was a kid. Even if I hadn’t of had the threat of getting my head kicked in by local lads for not playing Warhammer I would have still bought this magazine just from the cover. It has guns, eyepatches, swords, skulls, rats and the ground is green. It seems now that the covers see to feature actual models superimposed onto computerised backgrounds which mostly looks terrible and cheap, I still feel that the illustrated covers looked much cooler. Also note the best White Dwarf logo, made from METAL.

The only reason I like this page is due to the fact that all of the staff pictures on the left pretty much looks like a Carcass band promo photo. I always thought these guys were godlike when I was young, not sure on my thoughts on them now…

The Blood Angels Mephiston model was one of the first I bought and might actually be the very first but I can’t be 100% (It may have been the painting starter kit which had a Space Marine & a Chaos Warrior included). There was no rhyme or reason for buying it- I had no idea about any of the armies or what I wanted to collect, I had no rule books I just thought it looked awesome (See left shoulder pad). That pretty much set the tone for my model buying when I was young, I would just buy whatever I wanted and my mum used to ask me if they were all in the same army – I told her that they were but I was just buying whatever I wanted to paint. I didn’t have much money when I was a kid so it was a pretty daft way of spending it and it meant in the end I had a mix of Space Marines/Imperial Guard/Sisters of Battle/Eldar(?!) and some random Epic models.

Just look at the artwork on these boxes, look at them! Titans Legions is up there with some of my favourite artwork mostly because – what is that Warlord Titan even firing at?!

This piece of art by John Blanche is maybe my favourite piece of Warhammer artwork ever. I remember spending a lot of time pouring over the smaller details; for example the people falling over the cliff in the background. The servitors, tech priests and servo skulls flying about. I loved the sense of scale, although I liked the idea of small skirmishes, ever since I was a kid 40k was always about huge battles with thousands of units and art like this is what captured my imagination most. The idea of of the 40k universe is that these battles are taking place for the sake of humanity – this really does  give you that feeling.

I think the one aspect of it that really grabbed me though was just how grim and bleak the whole scene is – the skulls, explosions, death and the fact a Space Marine is chilling whilst missing a whole arm. I’d like to do a feature on John Blanche in the future because I feel that his paintings and drawing didn’t just open me up more to the fluff and background of Warhammer but introduced me to the genre of Sci-Fi in a wider sense. I can’t help but link these pieces of art to my musical tastes that came 10 or so years later.

Battle reports just made me want to paint models, they didn’t make me want to actually play a game. I just painted models and then arranged them on a table like they were in battle (I may or may not have then taken photos of said battles with my dads camera). Nothing much has changed since to be honest – I still like the fluff of Warhammer as well as the painting & building more than I like actually playing a game (although that is mostly due to the fact that my terrible memory limits me from remembering the rules). I did enjoy reading the battle reports though because of the over the top dramatic ways the decisive moments of the games were described – it still didn’t encourage me to play though, just buy more models.

I liked this battle report but there was another one in a later WD which blew my mind which was Catachan IG vs Eldar and that’s what made me think about building scenery as well as painting figures. I’m currently trying to track it down so I can look back at it in more detail.

I used to call the mail order line and just chat to the guys there whilst ordering stuff, getting advice & explaining why I was buying individual arms and crazy stuff like that. I know a mail order line doesn’t really cut it in this day and age against the internet but I still wish it was a thing – although actually I probably wouldn’t call it as I hate talking to people. I had several grand plans for Golden Demon dioramas which never came to fruition, a good thing really as if I had finished them they would have been shit and the rejection would have crushed my already low self esteem.

This article has offered no insight into Games Workshop or the hobby itself in the 90’s – more so it’s been an excuse for me to have a walk down memory lane and think about the reasons I fell in love with hobby and how that influenced my hobbies and interests later in life. I know it’s easy for people to look back on things with rose tinted glasses (similar to how I see hardcore 2003 – 2006) but I really think that the asthetic of White Dwarf was much more interesting back then and was tailored for a more mature audience regardless of the actual age of the people buying it. But whatever, things change and I will always have this copy of White Dwarf which was a turning point in my childhood.