There is a box in your parents’ loft, or in a Tandy bag in that awkward cupboard you never open, next to a dire warning about the Millennium Bug, containing a CD wallet.
Inside that CD wallet, between a scratched copy of Unreal Tournament and something your mate burned for you containing a hacked Medal of Honor .exe and a lo-fi gif of a fat guy falling over, there is a Warhammer game.
You played it for an entire summer. You cannot remember which one. You think there were Skaven in it. Or possibly Orks. The box art had a lot of red on it. This describes approximately nine different Warhammer games released between 1995 and 2002, which is both the problem and the point.
Warhammer has been on PC for thirty years, spanning more genres than most franchises attempt in their entire lifetime, and until very recently a significant number of the best games in that history were simply unavailable. Not delisted in the modern sense, where a game disappears from a storefront amid a licensing dispute and everyone writes a Reddit post about it. Gone in the older, more permanent sense. The publishers no longer existed. The rights had scattered across multiple parties in multiple countries. The games themselves required operating systems that haven’t been current since the turn of the millennium.
Today, publisher SNEG, in partnership with Games Workshop, has put over twenty of these games back on Steam under the Warhammer Classics label, updated for modern systems. The collection spans from 1995’s Shadow of the Horned Rat through to relatively recent titles like Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, and includes seven games making their Steam debut for the first time. The question is whether they’re worth your time, your money, or merely your nostalgic goodwill. The answer, as with most Warhammer things, depends entirely on which ones you’re talking about.
The Golden Age: 1995 to 2000
The mid to late nineties were the period when Warhammer on PC was genuinely pioneering, producing games that competed with the best strategy titles of an era already overflowing with excellent strategy titles. This was the decade of Command and Conquer, StarCraft, Total Annihilation, and Age of Empires. Standing out in that company required something specific, and the best Warhammer games of the period had it. The licence wasn’t decoration. It was the design.
Shadow of the Horned Rat (1995) is the oldest game in the collection and the one with the most complicated relationship with the word “playable.” Mindscape’s real-time tactics game put you in command of Morgan Bernhardt’s Grudgebringer mercenaries across a campaign of escalating brutality, and it was punishing in a way that modern difficulty discourse has no adequate framework for. Units that died were gone permanently. Resources were scarce. The interface was a product of an era when usability was considered a secondary concern to ambition.
It was also, quietly, one of the first games to attempt what the Total War series would later perfect: real-time tactical battles with regiment-level control on 3D terrain. The ambition outstripped the hardware of 1995 by a considerable margin, which is exactly the kind of failure that becomes interesting in retrospect.
Horned Rat gameplay (Image credit: Games Workshop / SNEG Games)
Artem Shchuiko, co-founder of SNEG, the publisher behind Warhammer Classics, confirmed that Shadow of the Horned Rat was the hardest title to restore. “It uses a software-based 3D renderer, relies heavily on registry paths across multiple folders, has game logic split across different libraries, and originally came with a very problematic Windows 98-era installer,” he told PCZ. “We also spoke to some of the original developers, and they confirmed that it was an extremely difficult project even at the time. And even in the current state, we are not 100% happy with the result compared to other games.”
That honesty is refreshing, and rare enough that it deserves singling out. Shadow of the Horned Rat is a historical document more than a recommendation. Play it to understand where Warhammer on PC started. Do not play it expecting a comfortable evening. Do not play it at all, frankly, unless you have the specific kind of patience that most people surrendered sometime around 2010 when games stopped punishing you for existing.
Dark Omen (1998) is the sequel that got it right. Where Shadow of the Horned Rat was an ambitious mess, Dark Omen was an ambitious success, refining the formula with improved 3D terrain, a more manageable interface, and a campaign that balanced genuine tactical depth with the kind of atmospheric storytelling the Warhammer Fantasy setting demanded. PC Gamer US called it one of the better strategy games on the market at the time. GameSpot nominated it for Best Game No One Played, which is the most bittersweet award in gaming and one that Dark Omen thoroughly deserved.
The difficulty remains formidable. Your army degrades across the campaign as units take losses you cannot fully replace, creating a slow squeeze that rewards careful play and punishes overconfidence with a ruthlessness that would make a FromSoftware designer nod approvingly. SNEG left the difficulty untouched. “Our goal with Warhammer Classics is preservation first,” said Shchuiko. “We want players to experience these games in a form that is as close as possible to the original releases, including the challenge level.” Good. Anyone who plays Dark Omen and complains it’s too hard is wrong in the specific way that people who complain Dark Souls is too hard are wrong.
Dark Omen also required the most complex rights negotiation of any title in the collection. “We had to gather the rights from two additional parties on top of Games Workshop in order to bring it back,” Shchuiko explained. The fact that it took multiple separate agreements to make a 1998 strategy game available for purchase again tells you everything about why game preservation is harder than it sounds and why most publishers don’t bother.
Chaos Gate (1998) is the cult classic, and its inclusion here is the announcement that will produce the most audible reaction from the specific subset of PC gamers who remember it. A turn-based tactical game in the X-COM mould, Chaos Gate put you in command of Ultramarine Space Marines across fifteen missions of squad-level combat against the forces of Chaos. Limited in scope, constrained to a single faction, and featuring AI that contemporary publications diplomatically described as “hampered.” Also deeply atmospheric, mechanically satisfying, and featuring a Latin chant soundtrack so memorable that the 2022 sequel remastered it as a selling point. The AI, wisely, they left alone.
“Some requests are simply difficult to fulfil because there is no access to the original source code. That naturally limits how far we can go with certain improvements or fixes.” — Artem Shchuiko, SNEG
SNEG had prior experience with Chaos Gate through GOG. “We were involved in bringing the game back on GOG, so we already had a good understanding of players’ expectations,” Shchuiko said. “Some requests are simply difficult to fulfil because there is no access to the original source code. That naturally limits how far we can go with certain improvements or fixes.”
The absence of source code is a recurring theme in game preservation that deserves more attention than it typically receives. These games were made in an era when archiving source code for potential future use was not standard practice. Companies closed, hard drives were formatted, backup tapes degraded or disappeared. The people doing restoration work are frequently reverse engineering binaries to fix problems that would have been trivial with the original code. It is the digital equivalent of restoring a painting when someone has eaten the original.
Final Liberation: Warhammer Epic 40,000 (1997) is the one for the grognards. A hex-based, turn-based wargame faithful enough to the Epic tabletop rules that playing it was genuinely cheaper than buying the miniatures, which was and remains a low bar but one worth acknowledging. The live-action cutscenes, featuring impressively committed actors in full Imperial and Ork costume, remain some of the most entertaining FMV sequences of the nineties, a decade not exactly short on entertaining FMV sequences. The tactical depth was considerable. The presentation was earnest in a way that the irony-saturated modern games industry has largely abandoned, presumably after someone calculated the ROI on sincerity.
The Middle Period: Competent, Patchy, Occasionally Excellent
The collection’s middle tier contains games that range from solidly enjoyable to historically interesting to present largely because they exist and someone had the rights.
Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War (1999) transplanted the 40K universe into a Panzer General-style hex wargame with Eldar as the protagonists, which was a more interesting choice than the Ultramarines again and produced a game that strategy enthusiasts still speak well of. Mark of Chaos (2006) attempted to do Total War before Total War did Warhammer, with mixed results that were more impressive in ambition than execution. SNEG noted it required significant work for UI scaling on modern displays, which is the polite way of saying it was designed for a monitor resolution that now only exists in museums.
Fire Warrior (2003) is the curious inclusion. A first-person shooter set in the 40K universe, built on an engine that was adequate for 2003 and is rather less than adequate now, featuring a campaign that was serviceable but unremarkable in an era when Halo and Half-Life 2 were redefining what shooters could be. It’s here, it’s playable, and the people who remember it fondly remember it with a fondness that is more about the 40K aesthetic than the shooting mechanics. SNEG flagged it as particularly difficult to restore due to UI scaling. For what it’s worth, you were always shooting Tau in the back of the head, which remains an objectively correct activity regardless of engine quality.
40K Rites of War gameplay (Image credit: Games Workshop / SNEG Games)
Dawn of War and Dawn of War II, both appearing here in Anniversary Editions, need less introduction. Relic’s real-time strategy games are the most commercially successful Warhammer PC titles ever made, the games that proved the licence could support a genuine blockbuster, and the primary reason most people under thirty-five have any awareness of Warhammer 40K as a video game property at all. Their inclusion in the Classics label feels slightly odd given they were never unavailable, but Anniversary Editions with consolidated content are welcome regardless. If you haven’t played Dawn of War, the failure is yours and this is a good moment to correct it.
Man O’ War: Corsair is the one that benefits most from this initiative. A naval combat game set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, originally released in a state that the community had strong opinions about. Shchuiko noted it was one title where the original development team directly contributed to the restoration, addressing long-standing community issues and moving the game to a newer version of Unity. If you bounced off it at launch, the current version is reportedly a different proposition. Whether naval combat in the Warhammer Fantasy setting is your specific entertainment requirement is between you and your interests, but it’s no longer broken, which is a genuine improvement.
The Ones You Can Probably Skip
Not everything in a twenty-plus game catalogue is essential, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of dishonesty that PCZ finds genuinely distressing.
Chainsaw Warrior and Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of Night are digital adaptations of a Games Workshop solo board game. They are fine for what they are. What they are is a card game about fighting zombies in New York that can be completed in the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, and then its sequel. If this sounds like your specific entertainment requirement, they exist and are priced accordingly. For most people browsing the Warhammer Classics label looking for the next Dark Omen, these are going to produce the specific expression of a person who has opened the wrong door.
Legacy of Dorn: Herald of Oblivion is a gamebook adaptation. A digital Choose Your Own Adventure in the 40K universe. It is exactly as substantial as that description implies, and if you require further guidance on whether this is for you, consider whether you have ever voluntarily read a gamebook and enjoyed the experience. If no: carry on. If yes: here you go.
Talisman in its various forms is a digital board game that produces strong opinions in people who played the physical version and mild confusion in everyone else. The Horus Heresy variant at least provides 40K flavour. Whether digital Talisman in 2026 is a compelling use of an evening is a question you need to answer honestly about yourself, preferably in private.
Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition and Blood Bowl 2: Legendary Edition are excellent games that are already well established on Steam and don’t particularly benefit from the Classics label beyond consolidated presentation. If you haven’t played Blood Bowl, you should. It is American football with Orks and a casualty rate that the NFL would find concerning, and it is one of the genuinely good things Games Workshop has done with its IP over the years. But you don’t need the Classics label to find them.
The Preservation Argument
The genuinely important thing about Warhammer Classics is not any individual game in the collection. It is the principle.
Game preservation is a problem that the industry has been content to ignore for decades while the community has been left to solve it with increasingly desperate measures. ROMs, emulators, fan patches, and abandonware sites have kept more gaming history alive than any publisher initiative, and the legal status of most of these efforts ranges from grey to deeply uncomfortable. When a publisher makes the effort to properly restore and sell classic games, it matters, because every successful preservation release is evidence that the commercial argument exists, and commercial arguments are the only ones publishers actually hear.
Mark of Chaos Gold Edition (Image credit: Games Workshop / SNEG Games)
The commercial argument is not overwhelming. Shchuiko was candid about this. “These games are not generating fortunes,” he said, “but they do have strong communities and real demand from people who want to revisit the games they played 20 or 30 years ago. We are those players ourselves.”
The fact that SNEG are players of the games they’re preserving is visible in the approach. The work varies significantly by title, from graphical wrappers and compatibility fixes to deep reverse engineering for widescreen support and UI scaling. None of these are full remasters. None of them pretend to be. They are, in the best cases, careful restorations that make historical games playable on modern hardware without altering what made them historically interesting. The distinction matters more than the marketing language around it.
The rights situation alone justifies considerable respect for the effort involved. Every game in the collection had its own ownership puzzle. Some rights were acquired from individuals, others from trusts, others through licensing arrangements with existing digital distributors. “For some games, like Final Liberation or Chaos Gate, we licensed rights from GOG,” Shchuiko explained. “Funnily enough, back when my partner and I were working at GOG, Oleg actually signed the original agreement to acquire those rights from a US trust. Every title had its own story, and untangling the rights was often one of the hardest parts.”
The question of what’s missing is also worth noting. Shchuiko confirmed there are classic Warhammer games they wanted to include but couldn’t. “A good example is the early 1990s Space Hulk games, which are very important titles in Warhammer video game history. We are confident that we will be able to bring them back one day, but preservation takes time.” The early Space Hulk games are, for the record, extraordinary. If you’ve played them, you know. If you haven’t, they’re worth knowing about regardless of when they become available again.
The Games Workshop Question
There is an elephant in the room, and the elephant has a Games Workshop licensing agreement.
Games Workshop has historically been one of the most liberal IP licensors in gaming, which sounds like a compliment until you look at the results. The Warhammer name has been attached to dozens of games of wildly varying quality, to the point where searching “Warhammer” on Steam produces a wall of titles ranging from the sublime (Total War: Warhammer III) to the forgettable (pick approximately fifteen of the others at random and you’ll have made a defensible selection). The sheer volume has, over time, diluted the brand’s association with quality in a way that benefits nobody except the accountant who signed the licensing deals.
When asked whether Warhammer Classics risks being associated with that quantity-over-quality reputation, Shchuiko’s response was measured and fair. “Warhammer Classics is built around games that have already proven themselves over time. These are titles that still have strong communities, nostalgic value, and players who have been asking to see them return for years.”
That’s the right instinct. The Classics label is explicitly backwards-looking, curating games that earned their reputation decades ago rather than adding to the modern pile. Whether the label maintains that curatorial discipline as it expands will determine whether “Warhammer Classics” comes to mean something specific and trusted, or simply becomes another shelf in an already overcrowded shop. The inclusion of Chainsaw Warrior is, diplomatically, an early test of that discipline.
What to Actually Play
Dark Omen is the standout and the reason to engage with this collection at all. The finest Warhammer Fantasy strategy game of the nineties and a genuine piece of PC history, still difficult, still atmospheric, still rewarding in a way that modern games rarely attempt. If you play one game from this collection, it’s this. Clear some time.
Chaos Gate is essential for anyone who enjoys turn-based tactics, especially with a 40K bias. Think X-COM in Terminator armour with a Latin choir. Limited in scope, genuinely deep in execution, and far better than its obscurity suggests. The 2022 sequel, Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters, is excellent and partly exists because the community kept the memory of the original alive for twenty-four years. That says something.
Man O’ War (Image credit: Games Workshop / SNEG Games)
Final Liberation is for the strategy purists. Hex-based, turn-based, faithful to the tabletop in a way that will delight grognards and politely repel everyone else. The FMV cutscenes alone are worth the purchase as a cultural artefact. Men in foam Space Marine armour have never been more earnest.
Dawn of War in its Anniversary Edition remains one of the best real-time strategy games of the 2000s. If you somehow missed it, correct the error here. Dawn of War II is a different game in the same universe, more squad-based and RPG-adjacent, also excellent, and the two together represent an embarrassing amount of quality for the price of a round at a London pub.
Shadow of the Horned Rat is for historians, masochists, and people who have played Dark Omen so many times that they want to understand the ground it stood on. Approach with respect, low expectations of enjoyment, and absolutely no time pressure. It will punish impatience more enthusiastically than anything else in the collection.
Everything else ranges from decent to disposable. Man O’ War deserves a look if naval combat in the Old World sounds appealing and you have patience for a game that had a troubled launch. Blood Bowl is already on Steam and always worth playing. The rest of the collection is there for completionists, franchise devotees, and people who have specific nostalgic commitments that no amount of objective criticism will dislodge, which is a perfectly fine reason to buy something.
The CD wallet in the loft can stay there now. Most of what was in it is available for considerably less than the cost of replacing it, and it works on computers that actually exist. The summer you can’t quite remember can be yours again for a few quid on Steam. Make the most of it, Marine.
Warhammer Classics is available now on Steam. Interview conducted with Artem Shchuiko, co-founder at SNEG. All game images are property of their respective developers and publishers.
See also: The Top 20 Retro PC Games Everyone Should Play | The 25 Best PC Games of All Time
