How Pokémon's arrival in the UK changed Games Workshop forever

A few years ago, I was changing costumes between scenes in a period drama, stepping out of 18th Century workwear and into some noble’s finery, when a fellow cast member told me something I had never expected to hear. They had worked at Games Workshop for many years, and they told me that when Pokémon arrived in the UK, it nearly brought the company – Games Workshop – to its knees.

My reaction was probably as yours is now: I missed the hole of my stockings and almost fell over. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. Pokémon, that very cheery cartoon of an IP, had nearly levelled the grim-dark house of Warhammer? Was I dreaming?

It’s a thought I had to swallow as the play raced on, and though I followed it up with my friend afterwards, nothing more came of it. Time moved on and the story faded away. But I never forgot it. So when it surfaced in my mind earlier this year, I decided to do something about it.

I began by digging around in Games Workshop’s financial records on the government’s website. I sifted through a decade’s worth of documents, figuring that surely if something like this had happened, there would be a record of it.

If you didn’t know, Pokémon arrived in the UK in 1999, having originated three years earlier in Japan. Maybe you remember. I was 17 years old when it arrived so I skewed slightly older than the intended audience, but I do remember being impressed by the GameBoy games and I couldn’t help but notice the cartoon on TV. The trading card game, though, passed me by. Anyway, this meant the financial report I was looking for was for the year 2000, enough time to give Pokémon a chance to land.

Success, I found it, and almost immediately something in it caught my eye: suspicious remarks made by chairman Tom Kirby in reference to UK sales. “By our own standards this has been a disappointing year,” he wrote. Then he added, cryptically: “There has been some loose talk recently questioning the health of the Games Workshop Hobby.” (The Hobby is how GW execs refer to the miniatures business.) “The Hobby is in rude health, and is continuing to spread profitability around the world.”

Loose talk? Why would Kirby feel the need to say something like that unless Games Workshop was under threat?

I read on – and made my biggest discovery yet. It was a remark made by Chris Prentice, Games Workshop CEO at the time, in reference to those disappointing UK sales. “For some time now we believe that an element of our UK like-for-like growth has been achieved by increasing the appeal of our stores at the lower end of the customer age range,” he wrote. “We do not believe that many of these youngsters are capable of truly participating in all aspects of a complex hobby, which involves reading, painting and strategic thinking.

“Consequently,” he added, and this is the important bit: “we have allowed our customer base to become vulnerable to toy fads. Last year we saw a sharp decline in sales to this age group.”

Toy fads! That must be it. What else could he mean but Pokémon? It was my best indication yet that something happened at Games Workshop because of it. All I needed now was someone to say “Pokémon” on the record. But I read and read and I couldn’t find any explicit mention of it. And I read the following year’s reports and there was nothing there either, nor for the year after, nor in any of the company’s financial reports. Chris Prentice’s “toy fads” was the best I had.