The 90's Called- They Want Their Miniatures Back...

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

As I've mentioned before, one of the best things about commission painting is that I get to paint miniatures that I otherwise wouldn't be able to, whether because of cost, availability, or rarity. These, I suspect, fit into all three categories. What we have here is a set of miniatures that was never meant to be released to the general public and are, therefore, as rare as the proverbial rocking horse doings. This is a set of metal miniatures designed specifically to look like plastic miniatures. Confused? All will be explained but first, a little background.

At the tail end of the 1980s, Games Workshop teamed up with MB Games to produce three boardgames, set in the Warhammer universes and containing plenty of Citadel miniatures: Heroquest, Space Crusade and Battle Masters. These games were hugely successful, getting GW into normal toy shops and introducing a whole new audience to the Warhammer backgrounds and games. Not for nothing did they become known as "gateway drugs" and many gamers of a certain generation cut their teeth on these accessible games. Many more used them to bolster their armies, as they made for a cheap* and plentiful supply of miniatures. 

Of the three, Space Crusade (or StarQuest as it was known in some countries) was the only one set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe and saw squads of Space Marines (with some very exotic weaponry) pitted against a variety of aliens and denizens of the warp, including the fearsome dreadnought.

Which brings us neatly onto the miniatures. This set of miniatures was featured on the box cover and inside White Dwarf (issue 132, according to the excellent Realm of Chaos 80s blog, where I found the image of the page) and was meant to show what you got inside the box. Except they weren't what you would get in the box. In a classic "contents may vary from illustrations" moment, the models that were so gloriously painted weren't the plastics from the set, but metal versions of them. Now, it has long been accepted that these were prototype models, made to test out poses for the sculptors to base the plastic sculpts upon but that's not actually the case. This set of miniatures were actually produced after the plastics, as the box covers needed to be put into production before the plastic models were ready for painting so metal versions were needed in order for there to be fully-painted pictures for the box art.** A similar thing happened when I was working on the Talisman 3rd edition sets- the plastics weren't ready in time to be featured on the card counters and box art, which is why the cards have those fantastic Wayne England character portraits on them and, if you look reeeeally closely at the pictures of the complete sets on the boxes and in White Dwarf you'll see some of the miniatures are metal ones sprayed grey...

So here we are with my versions.*** As you can see, I've stuck closely to the boxart schemes on some, and not so much on others. What is interesting to note is just how bad the production quality is on these, even for miniatures that are thirty years old. The mould lines were huge on some, to the point where I had to give up an accept that they were going to be there as I would have to hack off chunks of detail to get rid of them. And the fit of the weapons variants was appalling. If you look closely at the photos you can see few of the guns match up on the marines. The detail is also severely lacking. Hands aren't sculpted properly, details don't match from the back to the front (in fact, there's precious litle detailing on the backs of some). I did wonder if perhaps these were bad recasts but, on doing some investigations and looking at the photos of the originals, it's clear that the issues were there at the time. There's no doubt about it, these miniatures were never meant to go on general release.

None of that takes away from the fact that I had a blast doing these. They've been on my bucket list for quite some time and it was a real joy to have a go at them. Thanks very much to Richard Hale of Stuff of Legends for choosing me to paint these for him. I'm sorely tempted to break out my collection of Space Crusade plastics and get them painted up too. I'm pretty sure I've got one of each of the original set kicking around in a box somewhere. I could do the Heroquest and Battle Masters ones too, while I'm at it...

Thanks for reading!

Stu

p.s. if you like what I'm doing here, a click on the link below and the donation of the price of a pot of paint would be a wonderful gesture. I'm thinking of adding special stuff to the Ko-fi, like competitions and prize draws, so it'd be a good idea to at least have a look there now and then 😁 

*They were all around the £25 mark, which translates to around £65 in today's money, so still excellent value...

**Thanks very much to the legendary Mike McVey for confirming this to me a while back. 

***It's actually the second time I've painted the dradnought. The first one was to finish off a part-painted Mike McVey piece. You can find it here.