Building the Streets of Mega-City One: Where My Judge Dredd Terrain Journey Began

Sometimes it's worth going back to where it all started.

This video is a particularly important one for me because it was the first video I ever uploaded to YouTube. There was no grand plan, no carefully designed channel strategy and certainly no fancy recording setup. There was me, a Google Pixel 2, a pile of laser-cut MDF terrain and a rather enthusiastic desire to talk about Judge Dredd, and that's pretty much what happened.

The video is a review of the Mega-City Hab Zone from Sarissa Precision, a piece of terrain I picked up through Warlord Games for use with the Judge Dredd miniature game.

Welcome to Mega-City One

One of the things that has always appealed to me about Judge Dredd is the sheer scale of Mega-City One. It's not just a city with a few buildings scattered around a gaming table. It's a ridiculous, sprawling metropolis packed with megablocks, streets, industrial areas, citizens, Judges, criminals, mutants and enough strange infrastructure to keep a worldbuilder busy for decades. So when I started getting into the tabletop side of Judge Dredd, I quickly realised that I needed something more than just miniatures.

I needed a city, and that's where terrain comes in.

The Mega-City Hab Zone

The kit I was looking at in that first video is Sarissa Precision's Mega-City Hab Zone. It's laser-cut terrain designed for science-fiction gaming, and it immediately struck me as something that could work particularly well for Mega-City One. The great thing about terrain like this is that it gives you the basic architecture of a futuristic city without forcing you to build everything from scratch. You get the shapes, structures and layers needed to start creating those dense urban gaming tables that Judge Dredd really benefits from. And let's be honest, that's half the fun.

You can start imagining what happens in and around these buildings. Who lives there? What's happening on the lower levels? Which gang controls the area? Where is the nearest Justice Department watch platform? Is that innocent-looking citizen actually a perp?

Suddenly a piece of MDF terrain isn't just a building anymore. It's part of Mega-City One.

Looking Back at My First Video

Watching this video now is a little strange. It's very definitely an early YouTube video. I recorded it on a Google Pixel 2, and rather than presenting a carefully scripted and edited review, I basically started talking and kept going. There is rambling (that hasn’t changed lol), and there is definitely the feeling of someone figuring out what they're doing as they go along. But I actually quite like that. It captures the beginning of my journey.

There was no Adventures with Peps production machine at this point. I was simply a hobbyist who wanted to share some of the things I was buying, building and painting. The fact that I've continued making videos since then makes looking back at this one quite fun.

From Terrain to a Whole Sector

What's particularly interesting to me now is where that original idea eventually led. That simple desire to put some Judge Dredd terrain on the table eventually developed into my own corner of Mega-City One. Sector 102.

What started with buying terrain gradually became a much bigger worldbuilding project involving locations, characters, Judges, corporations, mutants and stories. I've created places like Dan Abnett Megablock, Pat Mills Tower and Basecamp Black, developed the gangs themed to Dan Abnett, like the Blood Pact, the Blue Bloods and Roane Deepers and introduced characters and organisations that inhabit the sector.

The terrain became more than something to put miniatures on. It became a setting, and that's probably one of the things I enjoy most about this hobby. You can take a commercially produced piece of terrain, put it on your table and then ask one simple question:

"What's happening here?"

From there, the possibilities are almost endless.

Where It All Started

So this slightly rambling video has a bit more significance for me than simply being an old terrain review. It's the first brick in the wall. It's where my YouTube journey began, but it's also part of the larger hobby journey that eventually brought me to Sector 102 and all the worldbuilding I'm doing today.

And that's why I wanted to bring this old video back onto the blog. If you're interested in Judge Dredd, miniature gaming, terrain building or just creating your own little corner of a fictional universe, hopefully it gives you a little inspiration.

And if nothing else, you can watch my first-ever YouTube video and see just how far things have come since that Google Pixel 2!

Welcome to Mega-City One.

The streets are waiting.