In 1992, Games Workshop was subject to a management buyout backed by a private equity firm, saddling it with massive amounts of debt. In the years that followed, the company looked at players' wallets like a dog looks at a string of sausages. It was not a good time to be a young lad with a dream of some day owning an army of Blood Angel space marines.
But before that was a halcyon time when Warhammer 40,000 had a reputation for being about wacky warbands rather than epic armies that cost an arm and a leg to acquire. A time when nobody expected you to have the right models because half the things in the rulebook didn't even have models yet. That said, the first edition of Warhammer 40,000 was supposedly a complete mess rules-wise—borderline unplayable without a degree from Wargame University. How true are these things?
