Take a look inside the book that started it all: The Second Edition Tyranids Codex from 1995, and how much 40k has evolved in the past 20+ years.
With new Tyranid rules on the horizon, now is a great time to take a look back at the old Genestealer Cults and Tyranid rules from the 1995 codex. This Codex was written by Andy Chambers, with illustrations from some like Wayne England, John Blanche, and Mark Gibbons, and stories by Jonathan Green.
Take a look at the full video flashback by scrolling down and pressing play on the video below!
This book is about 90 pages long, with the rules for Tyranids featured on pages 65-79, with pages 1-64 being fluff, special rules, and strategies. However, the most of the book was fluff, focusing on the two hive fleets that were around at that time. Quite a bit of that fluff has been retconned by now, but the original fluff was pretty neat in terms of where 40k was going. In each beastiary is the stat line for the model, with the armour saves being influenced by war gear rather than how it is now.
Tyranids were at a bit of a disadvantage with the lack of models, especially for Genestealer Cults, but they could loot and gain things that way. At this point, most of their models were still pewter as well, and the models were large for the time. Quite a few things in this codex were customizable with war gear. Breakdown wise, you had to take specific amounts of specific things for which swarm selection you were doing, such as support, broods, and characters. In the back of the book was the catalog of pewter components with skus, so you can order specific parts for each model. Phone ordering was a thing prior to the internet, after all! They also had a selection in plastic, as well.
Overall, this is one of the earlier codex books. Games Workshop went through 1997 to put out books, which started in 1993. Taking a look at the book with old illustration, old models, and original battle settings really brings back memories of where the game used to be and what has changed since then.
Travel down the road of nostalgia for yourself and press play on the video below!
