Dark Future – The Mad Max Inspired GW Game I Never Got to Play

Let us get this out right away, Dark Future was inspired by the Mad Max movies (Mad Max, Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome).

Note: this is hardly a controversial statement and not one that I ever heard anyone denying mind you, but bears repeating. Back in the day my only interactions regarding Dark Future was seeing the advertisements in Dragon Magazine or the occasional White Dwarf (I did not start reading WD till around #137). And by the time I could somewhat afford it, it was gone from the lineup and forgotten. One thought also before I go further, why is it that GW once again placed their ultra-violent settings for a game in the USA? I think they were trying to tell us something with Dark Future and Blood Bowl...

This game came back to me a few months back when I purchased a copy of Car Wars made by Steve Jackson Games at the local game store. I got the copy for only $20 so not too bad I thought, but reading through it, holy crap is that game complex. Far too rule heavy for my tastes and very math intense. Now I am not averse to crunch heavy games or math heavy, but Car Wars struck me in the same vein as Twilight 2000 in terms of complexity for the vehicle rules. Perhaps a feature of early 90s game design concepts as it relates to cars and the like?

White Dwarf cars via slotforum

But it was then that I remembered that Car Wars was not the game I was shooting for, it was Dark Future! Ahhh well so off to eBay to see what sets are going for? Yeah... looks like I am going to need to save my gold Guilders for a while, or perhaps go for the "successor game" Gorka Morka? (I will cover that in a future post). In any event this is one of those ones that is on my radar now, but who knows when I will get to it. There is something that keeps drawing me to it and I am not quite sure why, I do not believe it is nostalgia either. I suppose it is possible to "procure" the rules and use Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars to simulate it.

EDIT: in 2021 I was able to score not only Dark Future but the White Line Fever supplement as well. 

Oh and look at that: is not the internet great? There is a wiki for everything, including Dark Future at Route 666, the Dark Future Wiki. As you can see for a game that had a fairly limited shelf life, it did receive a fair amount of support from what I can gather. Games Workshop did have support for expansions for the game such as the PBS4 Battlecars, but like many of the secondary (later they would get called specialist) games Dark Future fell by the wayside to a large degree by the early 1990s. This coincided with the revamp to 4th Edition Warhammer.

I assume if you have read this far you know about Dark Future and probably a lot more than me as I noted, I have never played it. Please lend me your thoughts on the matter after some selected photos that graced White Dwarf from the time frame in question, culled from Pinterest and the Lost and Damned site.