by Fantasy games & GW history specialist Jordan Sorcery performed one month ago a great live interview with Jervis Johnson in his You Tube channel. Jervis Johnson is one of the GW historical designers who participated in most of the hobby games made by Games Workshop during the 80's and 90's and designed the rules for Advanced Heroquest. He also had some role in the development of MB's HeroQuest, but not totally confirmed, it depends the source you check...
The full conversation with Jervis Johnson can be found in the Jordan Sorcery's channel here, however, I took the licence of transcripting here just the questions and answers related with HeroQuest and Advanced Heroquest, which I think are the most relevant ones of the interview for any HeroQuest fan... nevertheless of course I encourage you to watch the full video if you are interested in Games Workshop products history! If you detect any grammatical error in the transcription, please don't hesitate to tell me and I will correct it, remember that I am not a native English speaker.
Jordan already published another interview with Jervis Johnson during the last year (more info here), but this new interview extends even more the information then given by Jervis about our beloved board game/s.
Thanks to Jordan again for performing these great interviews with historical games creators.
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EXTRACT OF INTERVIEW WITH JERVIS JOHNSON by Jordan Sorcery, published in May 2024 at his YouTube channel, @jordansorcery
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[Video Minute 30:05]
Jordan Sorcery (JS): I was curious about so in the late 80s and early 90s there was a relationship between Games Workshop and MB Games, so that was when Space Crusade and Hero Quest were made, I was just curious about that little period in time, because during that you supported some of the development of Hero Quest and also developed Advanced Heroquest and I was just curious about sort of how that parallel work took place.
Jervis Johnson (JJ): Yes, yeah. It was an interesting thing, I mean basically um... it was Milton Bradley I think at the time rather than Hasbro wasn't it but they got in touch because they with Citadel because they wanted some cool plastic miniatures I think that's what they were really interested in and I wasn't involved in the process but Brian was able to come up with the deal where we'd provide them with miniatures for a game like a fantasy game, bit like D&D and we'd be allowed and they'd say that they were Citadel Miniatures, they include those that kind of like product and mention Games Workshop and say you can find out more about these things here and we'd be allowed to do an advanced version of the game and so the benefit there, and it worked really well actually as well, so Milton Bradley Hasbro had fantastic distribution and would get these things all over the place in quantities that Games Workshop at that time couldn't dream of producing and they effectively acted as free adverts for Citadel Miniatures and then people would come to Games Workshops would try and find out these other things and then there'd be Advanced Heroquest and Advanced Space Crusade would be an obvious cell for people like those who went into a Games Workshop store but they might just be coming in to look at Warhammer and things like that as well so that was really the idea there it was quite... it was proper marketing stuff again talking about, it was a clever idea, I think and worked out very well and we had a little bit of connection on the games design side, the games designers, with the Milton Bradley games design team. I've forgotten the name of the chap now, which is really bad of me as...
JS: Stephen Baker.
JJ: Yes! Yeah, Stephen um... yeah, that wonderful chap, very talented, it just a good and I think we might have done a little bit of play testing but really nothing terribly much the main contribution from their point of view was the miniatures that we were making which is obviously not something that I was directly involved with, then once that game had been sorted out, I did become directly involved because we needed to do the advanced version of the game to make that kind of like that clever plan kind of like work, so I was asked to do Advanced Heroquest and I don't remember... I think I might have had to had to started it before I'd even seen the finished version of Hero Quest so I don't think there's a lot of similarities between the two other than that they're effectively a dungeon crawler game. Now back then there weren't. I mean these were pretty much the first dungeon crawler games. I mean it's a whole genre now, I mean I've designed quite a few of them over the years but Heroquest was the first one, and so what I drew on was my experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons and in particular my experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons with a chap called Albie Fiore. Albie just one of the nicest most talented people he was when I joined Games Workshop he was the editor of White Dwarf magazine and the chief kind of like he did all of the artwork and graphic design for all the stuff so dungeon floor plans were created by Albie if you remember those from back in the day and all of the all of the graphics designed for all of those board games that were done by Games Workshop before it moved up to... was he knew Ian and Steve really well and I'd got to know him first work when I worked at Game Center the store that I mentioned earlier on because he was the editor of games and puzzles magazine then but he was also just the most fantastic dungeon master and if you managed to get your hands on things like there's well early White Dwarves but I think some of the best of White Dwarf scenarios and things like that there's some of his stuff in there and he was just brilliant and you know I played in his dungeon so a little while ago the some thing the TV show turned up where in Steve got interviewed and play they were playing Dungeons and Dragons and I'm involved and it's because that's how we running the game and they knew that I played in his dungeon so I was there just kind of like making up the numbers and things but what I did was I channeled Albie as much as I could into Heroquest and the thing with Albie's dungeons were they quite dangerous and it was a the economy you know you didn't have much money you didn't find huge piles of Loot and you advanced quite slowly and I think if you look at Heroquest with those things in mind, in Advanced Heroquest, you'll see all of those in there, yeah so it's difficult to survive and you don't tend to come away rich, so there was actually very little crossover with what Milton Bradley had done were doing they'd got their Hero Quest is quite different really to that, so really the person who deserves the credit is Albie for all of the times I crawled around his dungeon with Marcus, my father and Realo, the Hobbit Thief.
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Links to many other relevant interviews about HeroQuest are compiled in this thread.
