Today (January 4), the widow of Warhammer IP co-founder Bryan Ansell posted Bryan Ansell’s obituary on their shared Instagram account. Bryan Ansell died at home on December 30, 2023, at the age of 68. Bryan Ansell is considered the founder of Citadel, the small modeling division of GamesWorkshop, which he created in 1978.
At the time, GamesWorkshop was selling role-playing games in Europe and documenting them in its magazine WhiteDwarf. The creation of Citadel was followed by the launch of the war game Warhammer Fantasy Battle, designed to capitalize on its series of models. The success of Warhammer led Bryan Ansell to become GamesWorkshop's general manager, eventually shifting its focus entirely to the tabletop wargaming hobby, a space he still dominates today.
As a designer, Bryan Ansell was responsible for the 1980 sci-fi war game Laserburn, an original version of Warhammer 40,000 that included bolters and power armor. In addition to co-creating Warhammer Fantasy Combat, he also led the writing of Warhammer's Realm of Chaos supplement, which not only detailed the Chaos Gods in the game's setting, but set the tone for the heavy metal horror fantasy that would define these gods in the future.
Not everything Bryan Ansell does is well received. When Bryan Ansell was general manager of GamesWorkshop, he closed the company's London office and moved operations to Nottingham, where Citadel is based. The editorial team of WhiteDwarf magazine, based in the London office at the time, responded by writing an acrostic poem on the contents page of issue 77 of the magazine, which read, "Go away, Brian Ansel."
Bryan Ansell left GamesWorkshop in 1991, having seen the company flourish. In later years, he ran a small model manufacturer called Wargames Foundry, originally creating the company to give his father something to do in retirement. Bryan Ansell himself retired in 2005, and his family still runs WargamesFoundry today.