Golden Demon season always gets me a bit nostalgic, so with Adepticon in Milwaukee coming up (and Spiel in Essen being the other big one these days), I dragged my best mate Tim in for a proper natter about where it all started: the very first Golden Demon in Nottingham, 1987. Tim’s been in the hobby since the early 80s—Airfix echoes, D&D minis, Citadel spinners in model shops—and he’s the perfect person to talk about what the scene felt like when painting was something you mostly did in private, because admitting you spent your weekend painting Chaos Dwarfs in a steelworks was… let’s say, socially brave. What really blew my mind is how different entering Golden Demon was back then. You couldn’t just rock up and enter—you had to win a local heat at an independent stockist first, then get invited to the final. Tim walks through the categories, the regional process (Wales had only a couple of stores listed), and the absolute relics you got for qualifying: the first Golden Demon t-shirt (proper hallowed item), a special dwarf miniature for a “paint the same model” category, and even a £10 voucher—back when that bought you a worrying amount of lead. It’s a lovely bit of hobby history, and a reminder that the community we’ve got now didn’t always exist in the way it does today.