Actually that is very near to gospel truth. Many of us forum members are of an age to remember (and most certainly participating) the beginnings of the Nottingham empire. To me this is a special generation of gamers, not really the first, but different to those before and therefore the first of a new type. Many of this generation influenced the entire business and still do.
Without going too much off topic, I really like this thought. When I visited the Nottingham shrine on a recent Hadj on my birthday, and I’m speaking about the GW museum, where I even met Jervis Johnson in person, it struck me, how the humble beginnings, still presented in a couple of showcases , formed an industry.
A couple of guys interested in 2000 AD, Tolkien, Moorcock, Dune, von Däniken, German late Middle Ages, Rome, Arthur and archaeology created a hodgepodge world to sell models of small tin soldiers, and now we have a whole range of companies copying more or less blatantly that specific hodgepodge. Sometimes I feel the not-historical hobby is 90% or more GW and its copyists.