A lot of Warhammer 40k armies have earnt affectionate nicknames from the fandom: Custards for the Custodes, Nuns with Guns for the Sisters of Battle, impolite references to Toasters for the Adeptus Mechanicus. One popular nickname for the T’au Empire is ‘fish people’ – but where did it come from?
Incredibly, the T’au Empire is still the ‘newest’ playable race in Warhammer 40k, despite being added to the game in 2001. Other Warhammer 40k factions have received original model ranges since then, but they’ve all expanded on elements that have always been present in the game, or – in the case of the Leagues of Votann – are relaunches of species that had been part of the original game and then disappeared for years.
The T’au have had the fish-people nickname for as long as they’ve been part of the game. Some of their vehicles are named after fish, notably the Devilfish transport and Hammerhead tank that were part of their launch model range. I’m confident that this aquatic vehicle naming convention helped reinforce the nickname, its origins are far, far earlier: in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle menfish.
The excellent Warhammer 40k historians Snipe and Wib have made a great YouTube video about the history of Games Workshop’s menfish models, including their Warhammer 40k variants, which you can watch in full above. For the impatient among you, here’s a quick summary.
The menfish figures were originally created for the ‘Fiend Folio’ range, a line of monster miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons, at a time when GW had a co-publishing partnership with TSR to make DnD content. When that partnership ended, GW reissued the models as part of the C22 Warhammer Creatures line in 1983 – and gave them stats in the very first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle.
How does this connect with the T’au? Well, the menfish only featured in Warhammer Fantasy first edition, disappearing for second edition, becoming arguably the game’s first ‘retconned’ army.
At some point after that, Games Workshop staff started to use them as a joke: whenever fans would ask what the next new army or release would be, the answer would be ‘fishmen’. When the T’au were released, and happened to have blue skin and vehicles named after fish, fans decided that this time, they really were getting a fishmen army, and the nickname stuck.
I first heard this theory of the origin of the T’au nickname in the early 2000s, and in 2021 I attempted to verify how much of it was true. I put the question to the Oldhammer Community Facebook group, which at the time had a lot of active members who had worked in GW for a very long time, and a lot of fans who had been part of the fandom equally as long – did GW staff really tell people that “the fishmen are coming next”?
The best, and funniest response, came from GW’s former art director John Blanche, who admitted “I did numerous unofficial sketches which I’d leave in visible places at Games Day…” while Ted Williams, a GW miniature design manager, recalled “there was going to be a campaign called the Fins of Fury and it featured a Scales of Vengeance table.”
Another account (that I sadly can’t trace to a studio source) claims cheeky staff often added the Squats to studio manager Alan Merett’s planning whiteboard whenever he was on leave. After he warned people to stop doing this, an enterprising staffer added ‘Fishmen’ instead.
So yes, GW staff did used to joke about an army of fishmen coming next, all the way to the highest levels of the design studio. The idea of John Blanche sneaking fake concept art into Games Day just fills me with joy, and the fact that this insider gag is probably the reason the T’au Empire has its nickname is charming.
It’s a reminder of how different GW really was in the 90s. I appreciate no longer having to wait three editions for my army’s Warhammer 40k Codex release, but I do miss the sense of silliness.
If you have any other anecdotes about the Warhammer fishmen, we’d love to hear from you in the official Wargamer Discord community.
GW isn’t beyond silly goofs with the community, though now they’re handled by the marketing team. I found the new Horus Heresy teaser groan worthy, and editor Alex may find it a bit brain-melting, but it is at least fun.
Source: Wargamer
