Warhammer 40K: The Space Marines That Never Were

Purity of the Seal

Despite the grandiose scale of the setting, there inevitably wouldn’t be room for every part of it to be represented in the confines of a single game. But did this also mean there were features the developers themselves wanted, but wouldn’t be able to include?

“We thought about vehicles during our pre-production phase but that never really got off the ground. We even experimented with an Eldar Titan; and before the rumours start flying, the Eldar were never going to be in game but we just picked that unit and put it in to see how it would feel.

We also had several units that we had to cut - some of them quite far along in development - for various reasons. My favourite casualty was a red Gretchin holding live grenades which would run towards you yelling maniacally and then explode. We called him the Retchin…clever I know.”


Some of these cuts will come as sad news to Games Workshop fans. An Imperial Titan making it into Space Marine was a big thing (literally), but to have two of them? And to have them fighting each other?!

The Eldar Titan wasn't the only thing that was culled from the final game though. Other units and vehicles which fell by the wayside included an Ork walker vehicle, called the Killa Kan, which can be seen in early trailers (33 seconds) but were mysteriously absent from the finished release.

“Sadly the Killa Kan proved to be a problem at one point of the development and we had to cut them. We actually feel pretty bad about that because we really wanted to include them, but it all boiled down to if they felt right in game. We didn’t want to include things that we couldn’t make awesome.”


While awesome is preferable to unremarkable, Space Marine’s lack of vehicles is glaring. However, the prospect of a lumbering bipedal death machine that can shred you with ease is something to look forward to in a possible sequel, or DLC, along with hopefully all the other vehicles left on the drawing board at some point.

On the subject of war machines, it seems only natural in a universe where there is only war that the weaponry would be equally important to the authenticity of the experience:

“There was still an extraordinary amount of work involved in getting all of the weapons to feel right, lots of trial and error but the first pass was often extremely close to what we ended up going with. The universe is very detailed and there’s a wealth of information on most things so it’s easy to get a sense of how most weapons should feel and look with some exceptions.

We struggled a bit more with the Melta gun though. In the end we created something that is a bit more distinct than what it is in the tabletop game. The jump pack also went through more revisions than something like the bolter, but it stayed fairly consistent.”