Call of Duty has already thrown King Kong, Godzilla, and Nicki Minaj into its brand synergy blender, so a Warhammer 40,000 crossover is next

The last stand of a group of Crimson Fists space marines
(Image credit: Games Workshop)

"Operators are only as strong as the oaths they uphold", says the official Call of Duty Twitter account, by way of announcing skins based on gothic space satire Warhammer 40,000 are coming to Warzone and Modern Warfare 3. Expect skins based on the Adeptus Astartes, Adepta Sororitas, and Astra Militarum among others, which is to say the superhuman space marines and battle sisters as well as the poor doomed ordinary troopers of the Imperial Guard. I suspect the marines will not actually be eight-feet tall, as that might make it a bit too easy to noscope headshot them.

Before the word "Fortnite-ification" emerges from your mouth, it's worth mentioning this is far from the first Call of Duty crossover. CoD has already enjoyed cross-branding exercises featuring Tomb Raider, The Boys, both Godzilla and King Kong, Diablo, Spawn, Evil Dead, He-Man, actual human being Nicki Minaj, and more. There is a certain precedent in the market is what I'm saying.

I used to play Quake as various Transformers and characters from the Snorks—which was basically the Smurfs but underwater—so I understand the appeal. Those were unofficial skins you could download for free though, rather than something you might pay actual money for.

In other surprising 40K crossover news, first-person hose-em-down PowerWash Simulator was recently blessed with an expansion that lets you clean various vehicles from the 41st millennium. Sean Martin called it surprisingly fun, praising the way it "places you in the shoes of a tech priest of the Mechanicum who spends their days performing 'Rites of Cleansing'—the fancy 40k way of saying 'Hosing down a Dreadnought who looks like he took a deep strike into Nurgle's arsehole.'"

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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