The year is 2005 and I'm an impressionable 12 year old looking for my next gaming fix on our family PC. I slot in one of our many PC Gamer demo discs for a game called Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and boom (quite literally), the opening cutscene hits. I can tell you the exact moment I became a lifelong 40k fan: when that Dreadnought rumbles out of the fog and carves a path of bullets up the hill with its assault cannon.
It's hard to express how formative discovering Dreadnoughts was for 12 year old me, but that opening cinematic holds a special place in the hearts of many—it's easy to see why Relic led with the remastered version when revealing Dawn of War: Definitive Edition in this year's Warhammer Skulls event. Dawn of War was the game that introduced many to the life-shattering dual-threat of RTS base building and Warhammer, and for me at least, 20 years—and 100s of Black Library novels—later, it's an interest that's stuck.
