I often wonder what my oldWarhammerpals are up to. I’m still friends with my closest battle brothers from school, but what about the guy who turned up once a month with an impressiveEldar armybut eventually grew too ‘cool’ for the hobby? What about the guy who brought a Forgeworld Trygon to the table aged 12 and absolutely trounced everyone who came up against his deep striking insectoid monstrosity? Where are they now? Do they still paint, or play?
The same goes for later in life. I’ve moved around the UK a bunch, and had my strongest group of hobby friends in Leeds. Some of them worked for the localGames Workshopstore, most were regulars, but we fell out of contact when I left the country. We didn’t reconnect on my return, mostly due to my aversion to social media. I hope they’re doing well.
Some of this is circumstantial partnerships like being in the same school and having nothing else in common bar Warhammer. Some of this is the transient nature of modern friendship. I imagine many of these friends – especially those I knew as adults – are still enjoying the hobby. I’m pretty sure one got engaged. Congratulations, dude. But I don’t think any of them have been whistleblowers or disclosed sensitive national security data.
Edward Snowden Was A Warhammer Fan
It’s common knowledge that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowdenworked for an anime websitein his late teens and his forum posts show a love for Tekken and that he “always wanted to write RPG campaigns”. However, his interest in Warhammer is a new revelation.
Reddit user u/Xtra_Tomatillo_Sauceclaims to be a childhood friendof Snowden’s, and this week took to the social media platform to shed some light on his time hobbying with the infamous whistleblower in the ‘90s and ‘00s. He says that Snowden had a Dark Angels army, and they played numerous battles together as a part of a larger friendship group in the late ‘90s.
The biggest revelation, however, is that the group of friends, Snowden included, attended Games Day in both 1999 and 2000 in full cosplay, and at the latter event took home first place in the contest. The prize at Games Day Baltimore that year? The first ever Land Raider Crusader kit, fresh off the production line, signed by the designers. The likes of the late Paul Sawyer and Rick Priestly were among the signatories.
u/Xtra_Tomatillo_Sauce has accompanied his story with images of their cosplays taken from White Dwarf and what appears to be an original image of the Land Raider in question, which is still in its box to this day.
Snowden’s face is obscured in both images (he’s apparently the middle Watcher in the Dark Angels cosplay and the cloaked figure on the left, holding the banner, in the Imperial Guard regiment), but it’s not a stretch to believe that he would be into this sort of thing. Warhammer is one of those hobbies that goes hand in hand with anime and video gaming.
Who knows if this tale is true or not, but if nothing else, u/Xtra_Tomatillo_Sauce’s account of turn-of-the-century hobby experience is a blast of nostalgia that I didn’t realise I had. I didn’t get into the hobby until a little later – I’m about ten years younger than the hobbyists in this friendship group – but my experiences at ‘00s Games Days in the UK were formative to my Warhammer experience. This was a time when you could approach designers and ask for a range of plastic Hobbits for theLord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game(still waiting, Troke) or buy an official-but-not-generally-released Imperial ammo crate for carrying plasma weaponry. I didn’t have any of that to hand, so I put my pile of shame in there instead.
Edward Snowden may have released thousands of sensitive government documents, but, to my knowledge, he has never mentioned his (former?) hobby. Maybe he’s ashamed of his past. Maybe he’s moved on with his life. Maybe he still collects. Maybe he runs a Warhammer blog under the pseudonym Lion El’Snowden. Whatever his hobby status now, it’s interesting that those forgotten friends, those fellow players you fell out of touch with, could have gone on to be anything. They might have moved to New Zealand. They might have won a Golden Demon. They might have fled the US to a country without an extradition treaty. You never do know.
