Warhammer 40k fans are spoiled for choice when it comes to videogames these days, but we narrowly missed out on something truly special. Speaking in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, indie game developer Zach Barth reveals how his former studio ‘Zachtronics’ opened talks with Games Workshop to make a licensed Warhammer 40k game all about engineering puzzles and factory building.
Warhammer 40k fans will fall into two camps at this news – the ones who are scratching their heads, and the ones who, like me, are already devastated to learn that this didn’t come to pass. For the benefit of the head scratchers, Zachtronics was an indie studio that made its name with fascinating, open-ended puzzle games that are so distinctive as they acquired their own genre epithet – the ‘Zachlike’.
Zachlikes games are about building increasingly complicated interconnected systems, a little bit like Factorio and Infinifactory, but abstracted and distilled into a purer form. Their very first game was a factory sim called Space Chem, but anything that involves engineering puzzles without a single best solution is fair game to become a Zachlike.
So in Shenzhen I|O you’re programming electronic doodads in a Chinese factory, while TIS-100 sees you reactivating the systems of a weird 1970s micro computer your uncle left you after he died, and Opus Magnum has you transmuting elements as an alchemist. If you can complete a Zachtronics game, you’ve got what it takes to consider a career in coding.
Zachtronics games embelish their crunchy gameplay with neat roleplaying touches. Most Zachlikes come with fake operating manuals for the systems you’re using, which are utterly vital to progressing through the puzzles.
Then there are the emerging stories hidden in the background – why is the information about that one processing unit in that old micro computer restricted, and why do so many of the calibration tests relate to to decoding encrypted signals? Just what did your uncle pick up at that old swap meet?
In the Rock Paper Shotgun interview, Barth explains that while he isn’t a tabletop gamer at all, he’s fascinated by the Warhammer 40k universe and lore. He reportedly pitched the concept of a Warhammer 40k Zachlike to Games Workshop, in which the player would be an Adeptus Mechanicus tech priest laboring within a Forge World.
The team at GW was apparently receptive to the idea, but the project didn’t come to pass for a variety of reasons – all of them amicable. Barth was reportedly concerned about the audience appetite for a Warhammer 40k game without any violence in it, and whether the type of humor he wanted to put into the game’s story would gel with the restrictions of a Warhammer 40k license.
Then there was the cost – reportedly, Games Workshop’s licensing terms at the time were actually some of the best Barth had seen for indie game developers, but the cost was still high enough to make the small studio take pause.
I’ll echo Rock Paper Shotgun interviewer Edwin Evans-Thirlwell here: “I would absolutely love to play a Zachtronics Warhammer 40,000 game”. Can you imagine trying to build a functional assembly line that has to somehow incorporate prayers, sacred unguents, choral singing, and cyber-cherubs carrying censors of incense?
Perhaps you’d be tasked with repairing sacred machines according to degraded transcripts of ancient schematics. Maybe you’d have to incorporate new archeotech into already ill-balanced systems. Dogmatic schisms could erupt midway into the game, rendering certain technologies profane, and forcing you to rewire your work into an even more horrible mess. And then, what if Chaos scrapcode started to infect the Forge World?
The narrative elements could sing, too. As evidenced by the story in the videogame Mechanicus, the Adeptus Mechanicus make absolutely fantastic squabbling bosses, a perfect background to a game focused on completing ever more complicated and abstruse engineering challenges. And just imagine the kind of in-universe manual that you would be working with!
When game developers have moved away from the Space Marines to explore other Warhammer 40k factions for videogames, there have been some great matches. I’ve already mentioned Mechanicus, and the Ork-themed destruction derby game Speed Freeks is a blast, if a little lacking in the netcode. Moving beyond action games entirely could open things up even more.
Just picture a Sim City game about governing a Hive City; a Crusader Kings style game about Imperial nobles vying for control of a sub-sector; a ‘Papers Please’-style bureaucratic drama set in the Adeptus Administratum; a Telltale-like detective game about an Inquisition investigation…
While these remain forlorn daydreams, we’ll console ourselves by playing some more Space Marine 2. If you want to find a game that feels like it’s exploring an under-exposed corner of Warhammer 40k lore, even though it’s not connected to the setting at all, check out Forever Winter.
Source: Wargamer
