Chainsaw Warrior - The End of an Era

Written by Tomas Rawlings, Auroch Digital CEO.

All good things must come to an end, and so this blog post notes that Auroch Digital’s publishing rights for Chainsaw Warrior will be expiring on 31st May 2021. This means that from that date onwards you’ll not be able to buy a copy of either Chainsaw Warrior or Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night on any platform. Though if you own it already, you’ll still be able to play it in your Steam library or, if it is on your mobile drive now, on there. For those who want any support on the game, we’ll keep the game pages up here and here on our site with information on them to help out.

Chainsaw Warrior is a game that does, and will, forever hold a special place in my heart. The original was published by Games Workshop in 1987 and as a young gamer I loved it then. It is a solo board game where the player has to race against the clock to save New York from destruction at the hands of a strange entity called ‘Darkness’. While solo games (or versions of games) are quite common now in board games, back in 1987 this was a rare thing! It was also really, really hard - which is a good thing if it costs weeks of pocket money to buy; you got your money’s worth without doubt!

I loved the game and its aesthetic so much that many years later when I got the amazing opportunity to work with Games Workshop on a digital title, I asked if we could bring Chainsaw Warrior to digital screens and GW kindly said yes! So it was in September 2013, 26 years after the original release, that we brought it to mobile to some rave reviews. 148apps described it as "a brutally awesome good time" while Gamercast wrote it was an accurate adaptation of the original, saying it has "everything you want in a digitised version of the Games Workshop classic". As part of this, I was honoured to get to interview the games original creator, Stephen Hand. A month later in October of 2013 we released it on Steam too. This was our first Steam release and opened the doors to that key gaming platform to us.

Just under two years later, in 2015, we released a sequel game, Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night, which saw the eponymous Chainsaw Warrior headed to the jungles of South America. Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night sees the player fighting against hordes of Aztec Zombies, and the clock, to save reality itself from Darkness. We have more rave reviews for the sequel, including “Overall, Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of Night is a really nice surprise. It’s straightforward fun and it really works.” (8/10 – Retro 101) and “Chainsaw Warrior: Lords of the Night has a hugely addictive gameplay and that’s where its key strength lies.” (8.5/10 – Game Debate). 

I’m hugely proud of both games and it was a real privilege to be allowed to work with a bit of gaming history which has both a personal and professional connection to me. Chainsaw Warrior opened a path to working with Games Workshop for Auroch Digital and fulfilled a life-long wish to work on Games Workshop titles.

While this chapter of gaming has ended, we’re happy to say our relationship with Games Workshop has not; you can grab the other 80s classic, Dark Future here. There will be more to say too in the future…