Dark Future

Dark Future is a 1988 miniature wargame by Games Workshop. It is set in an alternate reality where the United States—and indeed the rest of the world—is falling apart. Society is going to ruins, and the natural laws of physics are breaking down. The megacorps rule, technology runs rampant, and Sanctioned Ops patrol the roads and highways tracking down and destroying the renegade scum who live there, outside of the law and doing what they please.

A game bearing the name Dark Future was originally developed for Games Workshop as a cyberpunk role-playing game. When that project was canceled, that game's co-author and GW board game developer Marc Gascoigne ported it onto Richard Halliwell's car-racing game system, using a mechanic originally developed for Judge Dredd role-playing game adventure Slaughter Margin. The game was seen as a replacement for GW's early board game Battlecars, which merged James Bond-like combative car gadgets in a Mad Max-inspired background. The game was originally set in the (then-future) year of 1995.

Novels by Jack Yeovil (a pen name of Kim Newman) created an elaborate alternate history where Elvis Presley is a hard-as-nails bounty hunter and Oliver North is president of the United States. In 2005 the Dark Future setting was brought back as a series of novels published by Games Workshop's fiction imprint Black Flame. They updated the setting to 2021, and released several new titles. However, while several pop-culture references were updated in the books, some lines retain their original wording, and now seem out of place (such as when character Jazzbeaux thinks of the millennium coming around in five years' time in 'Route 666').

In the board game, the player plays the part of a Sanctioned Op—a bounty hunter of the future—or a Renegade, dueling for survival in high-tech vehicles of the present.