What if there had been a Warhammer 40,000 videogame on the 1998 Gameboy Color handheld console? Well, it might have looked a little bit like ‘Imperium Strike Force’, a fan-created indie game inspired by both the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, and the retro shooter Mercenary Force.
Imperium Strike Force is the work of Orlando Mee, an indie game maker based in Nharangga land in regional South Australia. It compresses the gothic world of Warhammer 40k down onto a tiny 160 x 144 screen, and puts you in charge of a squad of teeny Space Marines and Astra Militarum, blasting away at pixellated Genestealer Cultists and Tyranid beasties.
This is definitely the simplest Warhammer 40k game out there, a side-scrolling shooter in which you can change the formation of your troops to prioritise shooting or minimise your exposure to enemy attacks and stage hazards. Oh, and you can sacrifice one trooper to summon a dreadnought!
It’s a very short demo, which you can play in full in about a minute via your browser on Itch.io, and there’s even a file to run on a Gameboy Color if you have the right kit to write it to a blank cartridge. We haven’t tested it on actual hardware, but the demo placed well in a 2023 Gameboy development competition which did test the game on hardware.
The gameplay is heavily inspired by Mercenary Force, a shooter set in ancient Japan and released for the original Gameboy in 1990. For those of you who grew up in a world of omnipresent touchscreen devices, this video from World of Longplays will show you what the peak of mobile gaming looked like back then:
Warhammer 40k never made it onto the original Gameboy, so Imperium Strike Force is a nifty little window into a parallel universe. What would things have looked like if 40k had been an even bigger cultural force even earlier in its history?
How ambitious would people have been converting the Warhammer 40k factions into teeny pixel art? Would we have an Aeldari platformer? A Tetris knock-off set during the Siege of Terra? A tactics RPG focused on the Space Marine Chapters?
A nerd can dream. If you want a recommendation for a great pixel art game with massive Warhammer 40k vibes, absolutely check out our feature on Void War, a game so dangerously moreish I had to uninstall it from my PC.