Chainsaw Warrior Returns! #ChainsawWarrior

July 22, 2013

I’m really happy to say that we’ve gone public with a game we’ve been working away on in the background – Games Workshop’s classic ‘Chainsaw Warrior’:

The seminal hit board game Chainsaw Warrior, made by Games Workshop back in 1987 is set to return this year in a digital form. The original 80s game was a notable rarity in that it was a solo board game that pitted the player not against others but against the clock. The game saw New York balancing on the precipice of darkness as twisted forces from another reality attempted to rip the city from this world into theirs. Standing between them and the destruction of the city was a lone figure, the brutal and mysterious Chainsaw Warrior. As the eponymous hero, the player had to delve into a zombie infested New York tenement to locate the source of the evil spewing through the spatial rift and destroy it before he was destroyed. The game is being created by Bristol based indie developer Auroch Digital for mobile and desktop platforms.

Now I loved this game back in the day and I’ve always wanted to do some Games Workshop projects, also being a huge fan. See chainsawwarrior.net net for more. So this is very exciting for me. We’ve been getting a great response so far, for example – Rock paper Shotgun:

There are three immediate things to note about Chainsaw Warrior:

1) Despite claims that they are violent, computerised games have managed to exist for ages without Chainsaw Warrior becoming a best-selling franchise. Gears of War doesn’t count.
2) The game is a digital adaptation of a 1987 Games Workshop boardgame for one player. I have never heard of that game but I did adapt Cluedo for solo play when I was a youngster. It was rubbish. If I had a time machine, I’d risk some sort of paradoxsplosion in order to introduce my younger self to Chainsaw Warrior.
3) Killing monsters with a chainsaw is a good thing to do.

Indeed! And also Pocket Tactics:

Rawlings seems to have read my mind: today his Auroch Digital have announced that they’re the latest developers to join Games Workshop’s massive push into mobile gaming with an iOS and Android of the1987 solitaire board game Chainsaw Warrior. You play a Special Forces trooper who is sent alone into a mutant-plagued New York City with just one hour to save the world’s greatest city from the other-worldly creature that seeks to destroy it. If you’re imagining Snake Plissken as a proto-Space Marine, that sounds about right to me, too.

Thanks, Owen for that! And finally (for now) Game Debate:

Tomas is not new to this though and has worked on bringing other iconic franchises to the digital stage, including Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land. So when THQ disbanded last year, the Games Workshop licence (THQ had bought rights to the licence for the foreseeable future) became available again and Tomas was ready. This was his chance to attempt to do something he had always wanted to do, revive a classic Games Workshop game and bring it into the digital era.