Space Marine Terminators are described in game lore as first company veterans in each Space Marine Chapter, having earned the right to don the sacred Tactical Dreadnought Armour or Terminator Armour. The Cult is described in the in-game background as an infiltration force that weakens a target planet, infecting the local population and causing civil unrest in advance of the arrival of the main Tyranid hive fleet. A force composed purely of Genestealers can still be fielded as a sub-type of the Tyranid army, in what is known as a Genestealer Cult.

Since the 1990s, subsequent games like Warhammer 40,000 and Epic have absorbed them as part of the overall Tyranid army where they serve as the shock troops, although their origins are not related to any other Tyranid broods. Genestealers were described in an entry of the 'Aliens and monsters' section of the first edition of Warhammer 40,000 (the 'WH40K - Rogue Trader' manual), but they were very different from their Space Hulk incarnation, which was more influenced by the xenomorphs depicted in the Alien franchise. Space hulks may house more than just genestealers other threats aboard can include human followers of the dark gods of Chaos, daemons, and Orks who use space hulks as their 'standard' method of interstellar travel. Space hulks are often agglomerations of multiple ships, fused together by the magical influence of the Warp (the mystical parallel universe by which starships bypass the speed of light to travel the galaxy). In Warhammer 40,000, the term 'space hulk' is used to refer to any massive derelict space ship.

Hulk games 3 free