From the back of a van to the London Stock Exchange...

A grey day in 1974. Three games geeks are thinking about sinking everything they have into their dream of starting a games company. They go for it, but in less than a year one of them leaves. The remaining two carry on and end up living out the back of a van as they can't afford to pay rent for both an office and accommodation.

Steve and Ian in the ‘breadbin-sized’ office in Shepherd’s Bush in 1976

Pivotal moment for Games Workshop in 1976 at Gen Con IX when Steve and Ian first met Gary Gygax

They're living off canned food and takeaways with all their meagre earnings going into the fledgling mail order business. The business grows, and in 1977 they make the decision to open their own shop. It was going to be a proper games shop, as opposed to the small room at the back of an estate agents they had been working out of. It was a damp day in April 1978 and the shop was about to open up for the first time. But would they get any customers? They had no idea whether anyone would turn up at all but when they opened that door on the first day they found...

... a long queue that went around the block! The rest is history, as they say, and it's time to tell it...

Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson and John Peake were the three games geeks who founded Games Workshop in their flat in Shepherd’s Bush. Not being a fan of D&D, John left the company, and Ian and Steve turned Workshop into a fantasy games specialist.

And that's what this book is about. A history of Games Workshop, not just the business narrative but the story of its founders and their journey, along with all the people they picked up along the way.

How did Ian and Steve do it? How did they get to that first Workshop store? What's the story behind Dungeons & Dragons coming to the UK, starting a whole new hobby? How did Games Workshop grow after that? It's now so big that it spans the globe. And along the way they invented an entirely new book publishing genre, too!