In order to make Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 enjoyable, Saber Interactive had to make the Space Marines less like Space Marines. That's to say,

Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine

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2024-10-25 07:30:05

In order to make Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 enjoyable, Saber Interactive had to make the Space Marines less like Space Marines. That's to say, less like "semi-lobotomized, hypnotically indoctrinated slave-soldiers in thrall to an uncaring (and possibly non-existent) god", in the words of Rick Priestley, primary writer for the original Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader rulebooks back in the 1980s.

In Warhammer 40,000's supposedly satirical, definitively grimdark Imperium Of Man, the Space Marines are the genetically engineered sons and warrior-monks of the Emperor, a messianic figure reduced to a dreaming corpse on the Golden Throne, whose immense psychic emissions serve as a kind of spirit lighthouse for interstellar travel. The Space Marines are grotesque supermen clad in motorised armour, who exist to exterminate the alien, the mutant and the unclean. They are the ultimate embodiment of patriarchal xenophobic fascism. This is a source of some irony, given that they themselves barely qualify any longer as human, according to the ideals of uncorrupted humanity they champion.

"It's very hard to imagine how they live their lives," Space Marine 2's creative director Oliver Hollis-Leick told me in an interview, shortly after the shooter launched in September. "They're so far from our daily lives and concerns. And we had to find a way to bridge that extreme mentality with something more human, that could be connected to by fans, by audiences, by players. So that we could actually make sense of their story, rather than them just being fanatical killing machines, because it's hard to like those characters."