It is the 41^st millennium. Humanity faces endless wars in a dark and uncaring universe. Civilization is stagnant and beset by cosmic horrors beyond mortal comprehension. Mankind’s ability to transit the stars depends on a psychic beacon maintained by the immense will of a rotting emperor who has sat immobile for more than a hundred centuries on a throne whose charge requires the daily extinction of a thousand souls.  

At least, that’s the  fate of humanity in the universe of Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop game that has spawned myriad spin-off media from video games to animated films and a vertiginous catalog of literature. The Black Library, a division of Games Workshop, the company that manufactures the miniature wargames, exists to publish and maintain the hundreds of novels and audiobooks associated with Warhammer 40K, as it is often called. The Horus Heresy, which is just one series set in this universe, consists of 64 published volumes alone.  

The latest addition to the grimdark oeuvre is the videogame Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2,  a wildly successful work of art that proves there is a market for cultural items that prioritize aesthetic excellence and storytelling over ideological box-checking.   

The game combines mechanics that encourage stand-and-fight hack, slash, and shoot gameplay in the face of throngs of unrelenting adversaries. It thrusts players into the vast and hostile Warhammer 40K universe with gorgeous set pieces that range from the green infernos of dense jungle planets to antediluvian “Tomb Worlds,” where one enemy of the human race slumbers a deathless sleep below the earth, while the surface teems with the demon hordes that threaten to tear apart the very fabric of reality.   

The high quality of the game’s music, writing, and voice acting elevate the production to the level of a space opera, and serves as a good introduction to the science fiction fantasy world of the books and tabletop game.  

Saber Interactive, the studio behind Space Marine 2, knocked it out of the park by adhering to a simple formula: If you make something that is good and beautiful, people will appreciate it. In fact, Saber CEO Matthew Karch apparently left a comment under a fan video saying all he wanted to do was create “a throwback game” that eschews “overblown attempts at messaging or imposing morals on gamers,” focusing instead on “fun and immersion.” What a concept.  

That little remark, however, which Karch later seemed to confirm was authentic, resulted in a controversy created by industry reporters, who are among the worst moral busybodies in the journalism. Few people seem to hate their target audience as much as video game journalists.  

I suspect the moral panic over Karch’s innocuous comments stems from the validation that what they fear the most is what sells the best. Indeed, there has been a recent series of expensive failures this year that prioritized ideology over all else. For example, as The Federalist reported, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League featured “a lesbian race-swapped version of Batman nemesis Mister Freeze.” It was a flop that cost its studio $200 million. Another title, Dustborn, was described by Forbes as “the most unrepentantly liberal and left-leaning games out there.” It crashed and burned upon release, with an all-time peak player count of 83.   

In contrast, Space Marine 2 boasted more than 134,000 concurrent players on PC alone shortly after early access went live, making it one of the most popular attractions of the year, even before it had technically been released. The game brought in more than 2 million players on its launch day, Sept. 9, and hit 225,000 concurrent on the middle of a Monday.  

Other games will sell more units by year’s end, but Space Marine 2 is a certified hit, and that is saying something, given the subject matter.  

Demetrian Titus, the game’s protagonist, is a classically masculine hero whose sense of duty is such that even the sting of death cannot stop him. As a Primaris Space Marine, Titus is a nearly 10-foot-tall genetically enhanced human-supremacist super soldier. He  weighs around a ton inside his armored suit and is armed to the teeth with weapons covered in seals attesting to his faith and moral code. Each plate of his armor is adorned by artisans and anointed with ritual blessings. Titus was born and bred to live and die under the banner of courage and honor alongside his battle brothers, who cleanse the galaxy of heretics, green-skinned brutes, insectoid monstrosities, and other evils beyond reckoning or human comprehension.  

Suffice it to say our hero and his story are coded in all the wrong ways for the hall monitors—Titus, the Space Marines, and their Imperium of Man are xenophobic, religious, aggressive, and masculine. That’s why mainstream games journalists have tried to fabricate a scandal around Karch’s views about what constitutes a good game. Others have deployed the pox of “media literacy” to insist that the real point of Warhammer 40K is to satirize the world its authors have been carefully constructing since 1987.   

“I don’t hate the game,” wrote one Gizmodo journalist, as if their opinion would be the deciding factor in whether it succeeds or fails. “The problem is there’s a non-insignificant sexist, racist, and toxic portion of the Warhammer fanbase that tend to think the Imperium is correct in its methods,” they added. “Newcomers might play it and not understand what the setting is truly about. That would be a shame.”   

In other words, they may not hate the game, but they absolutely hate the power of its aesthetics. The “problem” with Space Marine 2, then, is that it is so much fun and so beautifully crafted that you forget that you’re supposed to have contempt for poor, brainwashed Titus and to despise the Imperium of Man he serves. The regime that rules humanity in Warhammer 40K is indeed a cruel, bloody, stagnated thing held together by the rotting carcass of a carrion emperor. But it’s also all that stands between humans and their utter annihilation at the hands of murderous aliens and unspeakable demonic horrors; unlike in most science fiction, religious faith is the only thing that offers mankind psychic protection from the supernatural forces that prey upon it. These are key tensions at the heart of Warhammer 40K. However, and with great irony, media literacy leads people to the same conclusions about the empire as the chief enemies of humanity in the lore.  

But is it appropriate to speak of video games as art? I think so. In Glittering Images, Camille Paglia wrote that in his Star Wars saga, George Lucas “fused ancient hero legends from East and West with futuristic science fiction and created characters who have entered fiction and created characters who have entered the dream lives of millions.” Lucas, she added, used “video-game graphics, interactivity, and music” to make something that invoked Dante in the dramatic battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin on the hellish molten world of Mustafar.   

I believe that certain video games can also rise to this level. Certainly, the censors are worried about the power of aesthetics to shape the perceptions of players.   

In Demetrian Titus, Saber has its own Dante. His ascent from the pits of cosmic conflict has catapulted the studio to new success while raising the world of Warhammer 40K to the attention of an audience that is having too much fun to be browbeaten by liberal moralists.