There is a seemingly endless and endless number of Warhammer 40,000 games, but many of them are so far under the radar you’ve likely never heard of them. One such game is Warhammer 40,000: Glory in Death, a barely-heard-of turn-based tactics game that also served as the last physical release for the short-lived Nokia N-Gage.
Speaking on an upcoming episode of the FRVR Podcast, game director Alastair Cornish explained that the game was originally designed to be the gritty Pokemon of the Nokia N-Gage platform. “We pitched it around the same time as a Game Boy Advance title and it was going to be like each cartridge could hold a couple of armies.”
Outside of the digital-only port of Metal Gear Solid mobile, which was released two years after, Warhammer 40,000: Glory in Death was the last official game for the Nokia N-Gage. The game marked the end of Nokia’s phone-gaming plans with even official review kits coming with sticker-marked discs instead of the usual laser-printed ones.
“I grew up with Warhammer, I’m super-passionate about it,” Cornish told us. While many have overlooked the game in the decades since its release, the developer explained that they purposefully designed it to be “super close to the ruleset at the time” which Games Workshop was usually “really gun-shy about” in the mid-2000s.
“We managed to abstract it enough so that if we make every three inches a square then we’re moving on squares and we’re not doing freeform movement and we can keep the same balance. So it’s actually super close to the ruleset which not many people managed to get away with,” Cornish explained.
While Glory in Death is a sprite-based game instead of a 3D RTS game, the forgotten N-Gage title created assets that were actually based on Relic Entertainment’s iconic Dawn of War series.
“I think it helped, and I think I can say this… there was a situation where, and I don’t think enough publishers leverage this fact about their games is that they own all of the assets that are made for the game,” Cornish said. “So our spitesheets were based on Relic’s Dawn of War 1 3D assets that were posed and we took screenshots and they became our spritesheets so it was all pre-approved.”
Cornish explained that it was “all above board” with blessing from Games Workshop and it meant that only touch-ups had to be done to fit the guidelines of the IP. “I remember it took them [Relic] ages to give us the files, they were a bit reluctant to give us the files, but we got them in the end. That was one of my ideas to cut down on risk, on risk, on overhead, on production time and everything else. Because it took so long to get the assets it almost became a problem but in the end it was overall saving.”
Similarly to Fire Emblem or Advance Wars, Warhammer 40,000: Glory in Death has an overworld map which switches to a side-by-side view when a skirmish occurs. In the original build, this was a seamless switch, but Nokia’s N-Gage requirements forced the team to introduce load screens to free up resources in case someone was receiving a call while playing.
“To this day, it winds me up,” Cornish said. “There was a technical requirement we had to have on the N-Gage which added this massive gap between the overworld map and when it pulls up a side view… it used to be really quick… it goes through a load screen.”
Cornish explains that the game’s load screens are entirely artificial as before the game would cause “a buffer of a second before a call would come through and they would not accept that”. To this day, playing the game via an emulator, that buffer still exists as the game still makes the time to allow for a phone call coming through.
“It broke my heart,” he said. “and there’s nothing we can do. You can talk to Nokia, you can try and explain, but at the end of the day, you’re up against deadlines, they’re not gonna budge against their T&Cs. What are you gonna do?”
Thankfully, Warhammer 40,000: Glory in Death isn’t a lost games. Fans have found it and preserved it—largely due to the fact that N-Gage games had atrocious copy protection—and it can be played on modern emulators. While Games Workshop has revived a number of classic Warhammer games for PC, this title will likely never see an official re-release, despite the fact that it is an underrated gem.
To this day, it’s unknown how many copies of Warhammer 40,000: Glory in Death sold. Cornish explained that he “doesn’t have a scooby” and wouldn’t be able to say if he did, but judging by the state of N-Gage sales at the end of 2006, it was likely played by a few thousand people, if that.
