Tuesday, August 2, 2011

The Ads of Dragon: Games Workshop (U.S.)

Issue #83 (March 1984) included the following ad, announcing the formation of a US branch of Games Workshop:
Despite the fact that the Delaware River doesn't border on Maryland, where GW was setting up shop in North America, it's nonetheless a mildly amusing advertisement. Since Maryland is my home state, I was actually ecstatic about this news at the time, since I hope it'd mean more ready access to British gaming products, in particular White Dwarf magazine, whose distribution in my neck of the woods had always been spotty. My hopes proved well founded and I actually subscribed to White Dwarf for a couple of years, owing to price breaks introduced to coincide with this move by GW. I also got a copy of the superhero RPG, Golden Heroes, that I'd heard about but never been able to find in stores until this point. Consequently, this ad brings back quite a number of fond memories.

6 comments:

  1. In Canada GW continued to be imported by RAFM at least through '86 IIRC. RAFM likewise cast Citadel minis for Canada. It was quite a bottle neck. Nothing new would arrive for 2-4 months then 4 issues of White Dwarf would arrive the same week.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Golden Heroes is one of the great unsung superhero rpgs. I remember it being quite solid, but it faced a struggle competing with stuff like Champions and the TSR Marvel rpg. It lives again nowadays as Squadron UK.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I played Talisman recently - not a bad game at all!

    ReplyDelete
  4. So, the real cause of the Revolution was a conflict over RPGs? I say, I did not know edition wars went back that far.

    ReplyDelete
  5. i always have love for Talisman, but i really wanted to see Battlecars. i'm guessing it was the predecessor of Dark Future but i still have this curiosity to read it. oh well...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Talisman was our game of choice with my group when we felt like taking a break from an RPG. The guy who hosted our group bought every single expansion that came out. It was an awesome game. Whenever they announced Capcom was making a version of it for the XBox Live Arcade I was super stoked. Then they cancelled it because of various undisclosed reasons. That really made me sad. Screw you, Capcom.

    ReplyDelete