Aliens, Tolkien. Dunno what Mechwarrior was copying. Maybe they invented the idea of giant walking war robots. Hmm. Yes. I’m sure.

This is like complaining about someone copying Palladium. The whole point of Warhammer is that it’s a copy. Warhammer takes your favorite themes from your favorite sci fi and fantasy worlds, and turns them into miniature battle RPGs. Good on them.

Good on Blizzard, too. Their RTS copy of Warhammer & Aliens is one of the best RTSs ever made.

Blizzard used to openly admit they were huge Warhammer fans, at least back in the Warcraft II days. I believe an old PC Gamer preview for Warcraft II mentioned they were running a Warhammer Fantasy game in the development office when they visited.

Actually Blizzard was contracted to make Starcraft as the first 40K game. When the contract fell through (over costs etc) Blizzard changed just enough to not get sued. True story.

Thats funny, Warhammer was bringing out books and producing minies over a decade before the guys at blizzard even started writing code…… look at company timeline before making assumptions.

Terrans = Imperium. Taken as a whole, literally everything they are is based on something from the Imperium. The battle cruiser is a chapter battle barge, the marines are pretty much space marines, the firebats are dual heavy flamer terminators (though not as tough), the Goliath is a small warhound titan, the medic is a female apothacary, ghosts are a vendicare temple assassin with touches of culexus

Zerg = Tyranid. The only differences are that the tyranid “overlords and cerebrates” are walking 1 man armies in their own right (rather then being helpless). And the zerg have no shadow in the warp (huge anti-psychic cloud around planets they’re approaching). The Sc2 zerg queen is pretty much a tyranid Norn-Queen in appearance and slightly in function. Also the cerebrate reincarnation is the same as what all intelligent tyranid experience as the hive mind can simply recreate any of it’s sentient warriors by transferring their memories to a new body. But unlike cerebrates the Tyranid ones are really and truly immortal as unless you manage to take out the hive mind, it can recreate them as often as needed.

The protoss have touches of the Eldar. The whole reason the templar/dark templar split was a sugar-coated version of the Eldar fall. Also the fact they use webgates to warp their forces to and from areas. Basically, if you take the Tau and Eldar and merge them, you get Protoss (possibly based on a leak of an early concept Tau alpha/beta, since the Tau weren’t officially released to warhammer till 2001). Their dragoon/immortals though are closest to a dreadnaught, since they’re a barely living warrior wired directly into the machine rather then being just the soul as in eldar walkers.