by Fantasy games & GW history specialist Jordan Sorcery has recently performed a great live interview with legend Rick Priestley in his secondary You Tube channel Jordan Sorcery Pods. Rick Priestley was one of the GW historical designers who participated in many hobby games made by Games Workshop during the 80's, 90's and 2000's. As a key actor in the success of Games Workshop company, his main contribution for sure was being one of the co-creators of Warhammer Fantasy Battles game and its sci-fi counterpart Warhammer 40.000. He also apparently had some role in the design and playtesting of MB's HeroQuest, tough not totally clear, it depends the source you check...
The conversation between Rick Priestley and Jordan Sorcery was exclusively focused in a long list of unreleased games that were never finally released by Games Workshop back in the day, and Rick talks about some of those unmade games which were going to be done in collaboration with Milton bradley, like did with HeroQuest. The full interview 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 those MB unreleased projects. I advance you that at least there is so interesting info about Battle Masters origins... and of course I encourage you to watch the full video since it is really cool, especially 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.
Thanks to Jordan again for performing these great interviews with historical game creators.
Here a few brief thoughts about the interview:
Rather surprised about Rick Priestley did not mention anything about such projected Warhammer 40k version of Battle Masters that Stephen Baker revealed us one year ago in this interview. Perhaps because it had just entirely been designed by Stephen Baker, and no involvement yet of GW staff in its design when the project was cancelled? who knows, just my speculation...
Also shocked about the "monster gladiator" unreleased game with MB... could such game had inspired the Avalon Hill's Arena concept recently included in the modern version of Against the Ogre Horde expansion for HeroQuest? I guess no, because it seems to be a genuine GW idea according to Priestley words, but funny to speculate too about this.
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EXTRACT OF INTERVIEW WITH RICK PRIESTLEY by Jordan Sorcery, published in Dec 2024 at his secondary YouTube channel, @JordanSorceryPods
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[Jordan introduces Rick who starts to talk about one of the first never-released games back in the day...]
Jordan Sorcery (JS): So one that we that, I mean, I've even done a video about it, and we sort of briefly chatted about over some correspondents was an MB game, and I wondered if we might start there, which was this kind of, this chariot game, right?
Rick Priestley (RP): Yeah, after we've done Battle Masters, which must have been in the early 90s, we were still in conversations with Hasbro, Milton Bradley, and whether we did another game or not was kind of being discussed, and with that in mind we had a proposal worked up by Nigel Stillman for a kind of fantasy chariot race game, and the idea was that you would have different racing machines, almost like Wacky Races you know? [Laughs] built by the different races, like so there'd be a dwarf steam engine for example, which should be the dwarf machine, and then there'd be the rather fancy chariot with the elves, and a wolf chariot with the goblins, things like that, and there'd be an element of building up a stable, you kind of play off cards to get advantages and disadvantages and train your chariots up, and then run them around the track, but I don't think you got much further than kind of idea, a brief, Nigel might have worked up to the basic game, but the deal with Milton Bradley it kind of fizzled out.
JS: Sure, because there were some, well we believe, some prototype miniatures made, so there floating around online there's a few pictures of those exactly like you described, the kind of different chariot styles, almost your snotling pump wagon kind of thing, and your elven kind, it's quite an elegant sort of yacht almost kind of thing.
RP: Yeah, I don't remember, but that would be exactly the sort of thing.
JS: Right, right, yeah.
RP: Nigel might remember more about the game because he designed the ship game, the Man O' War that we did for Warhammer, so he would probably have tried, I think he would have ported across some of the ideas behind Man O' War, you remember how you got like a template which you got the areas of your ship on and you could put damage markers on, and things like that. I think he would have ported that across to the...
JS: Wow, okay.
RP: At that's the kind of thing.
JS: Right, so there might be that sort of that continuity of some of those mechanics that didn't make it onto the MB typical.
RP: Nigel sticked it naturally, you like that kind of thing and also it's very suitable for a Milton Bradley size game, where you've got access to card and counters and pieces like that, so that's one that never really got any further than that I was I'm interested to hear that they were concept models doing the rounds because I don't really remember concept models. What we tended to do if Nigel was working on the game, he would make a series of mockups, but Nigel could make a series of mockups in like in his dinner hour [Laughs] and he get the idea really quickly, but there's no refinement in them, so what I suspect you're talking about are things which somebody would have taken Nigel's concepts or ideas and made a refined version of it, so what they be 28 I suppose they must to be...
JS: Yeah they seem to be, and then like metal miniatures, and there's a couple of different ones, I think there's maybe four or five for the different races and there's some nice looking models there, so it's interesting to see that they potentially, and they could have been for something else, I think these kind of prototypes tend to get leaked and they talked about we never quite know for certain what it related to, so it could be that they're from something else but they seem to be from around that time for that project.
RP: Before in the earlier 80s, mid 80s, we used to run a chariot race game as a sort of just a bit of fun at our factory get togethers, and we do exactly this, we had a big table which we made into a charriot arena and our staff would build machines or chariots to race, and there would be exactly this, and then we'd invite members of the.. we had a very simple set of rules, and they we just go "who wants to play" and "okay, you can be the Elven Chariot, you can be the Snotling Pump Wagon, you can be the Dwarf Steam Machine...", and we'd run that as a bit of fun for about half an hour, or an hour, and then have another round, so the idea was embedded, something we kind of had done before. That was definitely one of the things that kind of got away, and that was Nigel... there was another game that we did, which Nigel did, which also might have been Milton Bradley, might even have been an alternative pitch at the same time, but I can't remember it about the same time, which was a monster gladiator game, and it's similar concept the idea being, you represent a a trainer in these gladiatorial combats in the Warhammer World, and what you do is you have to buy an egg, from what I remember! [Laughs] you have to buy a monster egg, of a monster egg hunter going to the mountain and get these eggs done, it is definitely a griffin hat chicken, so you nurture your monster and you would then train it, in various... by a system of card games, and some of your trainers would be better at some things than others, so you would have a creature that then had characteristics that you built up or modified, whatever, and there was even an element of Chaos mutation in it, I seem to remember the idea for the plastic was they were almost going to be like a Mr Potato man or Beetle Drive kind of thing, where you had a base core of a monster and then you had it a head, and you had it a tail, and you had it claws, and wings, and so and so forth, so you'd have a monster and you fought it against all people's monsters, and essentially at a league table, and you see who wins, so monster gladiator combat... again Nigel did that and got quite away with it, I think, but it was either one of the alternative pitches to MB, or something we were thinking maybe doing us for ourselves. I suspect it was a pitch.
JS: Right, sounds like it could be quite family-friendly, it could fit into that sort of MB stable.
RP: Exactly it's got that thing going on for it hasn't it, so again Nigel could knock these things out very quickly and I don't really remember playing that, so it might that it never got any further than a kind of concept and a brief and a pitch, even to Milton Bradley for which we must have made something, but we might just have used on we had, yeah so that was an interesting one.
JS: Stuff like that then would that, just be people, like would Nigel have done that, in his own time, or...?
RP: Is that a project to work.
JS: Right, and then it would just going into a draw, we're not going to proceed with that.
RP: Yeah, it would be or it would have just gone on to Nigel's shelf, and then when Nigel, if he ever kept it, or a lot of these things just got bend, he found I've got a couple more which Nigel did, which I know pretty much disappeared, one of those was the chivalry project.
JS: Oh, of course.
RP: This was earlier, this was in the late 80s and... I think it stemmed out of Brian's slight discontent with Perries models at the time because the Perries were very historically minded, and we started to expand our figure sculptures, the base figure sculptures, we got more figure sculptures, and the need was to do fantasy and science fiction stuff, primarily a lot of 40K, Perries hated working on 40K and when they did fantasy they tended to make it very historical, so I think Brian got into his head that we had to sort of try and make some use of this historical interest that Perries had, which was considerable, and so he came up with the idea of it's Brian's idea that we create this game based upon dynastic marriages in the 14th century, [Laughs] yeah really and it would be.. it was almost like a role playing game, but with different elements, so there'd be an element of building up your family and your dynasty, which was done by cards, and marriages, and drawing up family trees, and then there'd be an element of warfare which involved mostly things like tournament, formal tournaments, rather than battles, so we actually developed a man-to-man combat game, so one-on-one combat game with cards, which was published in White Dwarf. Well that was going to be part of the chivalry system, and that was quite fun. I remember playing that because I made a mockup of all the cards and worked. It was Nigel's project but I must have worked on that because I can remember doing the working out the card deck, and I remember playing it with the Perries on the train down to salute one year, and it was kind of like you had a hand of cards and you played them as defensive and offensive, or strikes, or shields, or faints and things like that, and because it was published in White Dwarf, people might be familiar with it.
JS: I think they will, yeah.
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[After talking about some other unreleased GW games, now Rick and Jordan are talking about an epic scale version of Warhammer projected in the 80's, which was many years later morphed to the known released game Warmaster...]
JS: ... was that the only reason that project sort of fell by the wayside though? or was there some other reason that it didn't take? because epic scale Warhammer feels like a a good sell...
RP: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, which is why I kind of revisited it years later with Warmaster, and that was boiling all the time, that was always one of those when we do a game into one of these slots, we have to have a brand new game. In Warmaster was always going to be one of those, or epic Warhammer was always going to be one of those, and I wanted to call it Warmaster because I thought it was a cool name, and I kind of reserve the name Warmaster for it because Milton Bradley wanted to call Battle Masters "Warmasters" originally, and I said "Ahh!", so they didn't because I wanted to use it for that game, but also Warmaster is the title of Horus, the Warmaster Horus in the Heresy, and it's a bit close, so they called it "Battle Masters", so that was always there, never went away, but Hal didn't... when we transitioned from the old studio to the new one at Castle Boulevard, Hal was one of the people that didn't come with us, at that time we had a night of the Long Knives with the staff, and the problem was that basically Hal didn't... Hal was very difficult to work, no one would say I'll be responsible for Hal, put it like that [Laughs] he's an interesting character, but a friend of mine and because we were good friends I didn't put my hand up and say I could be his boss, because I knew I couldn't be his boss, because we were just two good friends, and no one else did either, so he ended up leaving, and he subsequently did a lot of work for Infovision, he worked in the computer games industry, which was kind of really... I would say was very well suited to. In fact he spent some time in America, working in California, so he had quite an interesting post Games Workshop existence, but that's probably why that game just got shed.
JS: Sure, just no one to develop.
RP: No one to do it, how wasn't in a position, even when he was working for it, he wasn't finishing it, his working habits were not exactly focused.
[The conversation between Rick and Jordan continues going through many other different unreleased GW games...]
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Links to many other relevant interviews about HeroQuest are compiled in this thread.
