Origin Story: The journey to GrayPrimer.com started in 1989 in a small school in Northern Ireland. The 14-year-old version of me was passed a copy of White Dwarf and it blew my mind. I'd watched the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon a few times, so I had a passing knowledge of fantasy creatures and magic. What was in the pages of that magazine, however, was beyond all of my imaginings.
Huge armies of orcs and elves tearing each other apart on one page, Space Marines laying waste to Chaos hordes on the next, and a preview of a fantasy version of American Football on another. The art was incredibly rich, and the photos of the painted miniatures had me spellbound, as I struggled to conceive how something so tiny could be painted with such remarkable detail.
And yet, even with all of those things, it was the 'Game of Fantasy Football' that hooked me the most - Blood Bowl. I loved the idea of the small bands of fantastical warriors, united under team banners, sharing a mutual loathing for the enemy and an unrelenting drive to win the Blood Bowl trophy. I had to get that game!
The only local store which sold miniatures was 10 miles from my home, so the first chance I got, I cycled there with an empty rucksack on my back. For the next few years, I was obsessed with that game: buying teams, expansions, rule books, etc. I even did some home-brew stuff to expand the game further.
When I went to University, all of my gaming bits got moved into the attic and were left behind for decades. I'd gone from being a student to being a working stiff, and for many, many years I forgot all about the minis, paints and games that were waiting patiently for me in the upstairs-upstairs.
I didn't come back to them properly until 2017, and the hobby I came back to was very different from the one I had left, 20 years before. Blood Bowl has changed a fair bit, having gone through 2 iterations, but much more than that, the hobby itself has changed significantly.
Obviously, the fundamentals are the same - buy some minis, build them, prime them and paint them. But there have been some major changes in the hobby too - the minis are so much more detailed, plastic has replaced pewter as the go-to for mass production, and the level of support available online is in a different world altogether. Amazingly, people have made careers from painting minis or talking about games through YouTube, Twitch, Patreon, etc. That's just brilliant!
It is now possible to up-skill in the miniature hobby at an incredibly accelerated rate, compared to how long it took in the 80s and 90s, mainly because of the content creators on YouTube and other streaming sites. The free access to information that touches on every facet of the hobby is game-changing and I love it!