40 Years of Warhammer: Miniature Retrospective – Multipart Space Marine
Games Workshop is celebrating 40 years of Warhammer and this week the focus is on a serious game changer – The first Multipart Space Marine!
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Warhammer and Games Workshop is taking some time to look back at miniatures that had a big impact on their work. Today we’re getting to a kit that really revolutionized the industry and shook things up big time for Warhammer. It’s the first Multipart Space Marine kit!
“Back in the day, that legendary initialism simply stood for Rogue Trader Box One. This box of thirty multipart Space Marines was released alongside the Rogue Trader rulebook, the source from which the universe of Warhammer 40,000 would emerge.”
Yep, you read that right. The RTB01 box included enough parts to build a whopping 30 plastic Space Marines. This was GW’s first plastic multipart Space Marine kit and it really made a mark on the hobby and the tabletop.
While this kit might look ancient my today’s standards it represented a big shift. While you still had the metals in the range these plastic marines were customizable in a way that was new and exciting. They came in a box loaded with weapon options and, again, you could make 30 Space Marines!
The look and style of the Space Marines was really cemented with this box set. You can still see the inspiration from this box in the current models of today. Heck, the Horus Heresy kits are refreshes of this box — right down to the mark of power armor that is being produced.
This Rogue Trader Space Marine box is the granddaddy of all Space Marine kits moving forward and the current iteration owes a lot to these original sculpts. Plus, we can’t understand how important the multipart plastic options were to the hobby side as they really allowed for players and hobbyists to go bonkers with the builds. Marines have certainly gotten bigger and badder over the years but this kit is one for the ages!
30 marines in a box? How times have changed.
