by Our legendary member Kurgan, performed time ago an great live interview with Patrick O'Rourke, better known as "Intergalactic Patrick" in social media, performed during GenCon 2023 event in Indianapolis. At the time of interview, Patrick was the Director of Project Management/Marketing of HeroQuest remake's products.
The interview with Patrick O'Rourke can be found in Kurgan's YouTube channel XSC3-HeroQuestFans here, however, he gave me permission to transcript it on this post for eternity, especially because of the bad audio. Nevertheless, of course I encourage you to watch the full video if you are interested in listening to Patrick.
On behalf of all members of Ye Olde Inn, Thanks a lot to Kurgan for generating this great valuable piece of history!
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INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK O'ROURKE "INTERGALACTIC PATRICK" by our Ye Olde Inn member Kurgan, performed the 4th of August 2023 for his YouTube channel, @HeroQuestFans
- Kurgan from HeroQuestFans (K): Okay we're at Gen Con, Day 2, HeroQuest Fans and we've got... I'm really sorry, is it "Patrick Rourke", or "Patrick O'Rourke"?
Patrick O'Rourke "IntergalacticPatrick" (POR): "Patrick O'Rourke", no worries.
K: All right, thanks for sitting down for an interview, so I hear that you're a marketing guy, is that true or what do you do for Avalon Hill?
POR: I guess marketing is a very pretty big big term, especially in the world of board games, yeah I do the, I guess, it's product development and business strategy for Avalon Hill, so generally I'm the business lead, so of everything that we're making or deciding to make next. I'm the one who's representing it within the organization and trying to get the next thing to happen.
K: Okay, are you on the Discord watching and reading what people are saying about everything?
POR: I am I mainly lurk, I'm "Intergalactic Patrick" on there, so if you see me around that's what I'm doing. I try not to talk too much because I'm much more interested in what everybody's saying than what I think because I already know what I think and I know what the organization that I work for thinks, so it's great to hear what actual players are saying, what makes them happy and what we're doing that frustrates them.
K: Yeah, listening is very important, so we certainly appreciate that one of your colleagues was making a joke earlier about like, who cares, but as you know whenever anything is off one bit as far as Hero Quest goes, I mean they're like what is the marketing department doing? what are they thinking? why are they doing it this way, instead of this other way, which would seem so much better?
POR: Yeah, I see that I got it. I get I'll say two things, one we're not perfect and two it's a lot more complicated than it seems when you're part of a large organization with conflicting priorities and stuff.
K: Yeah and we figured that and of course you can understand the position we're in as fans and customers is that on the one hand we're thinking "Hasbro is a big companyç, they're trying to make money, why would they make stupid decisions?" but then we know that companies will do things and it's kind of bewildering, and we don't understand why it's like "why would it be this way instead of some other way like?" let's start at the beginning and I appreciate your time, of course, but the beginning of Hero Quest coming back in 2020 as a crowdfunding campaign. I was unfamiliar with all of that world and I'd never pledged anything before a lot of people who I think were confused by that or didn't quite understand why it was that way instead of some other way, what can you say about that?
POR: Well, I can give you my perspective on it and the reason we chose crowdfunding is we didn't have any sort of real data that you could talk through to people who hold the financial, who make financial decisions within the company to justify the size of what Hero Quest is. It had been out of print for so long, we knew they were big fan communities, as you know you've met several of us today, we're all fans of Hero Quest. I had the original sitting on my desk for months trying to get people to play and checking it out and trying to get it back into in the market, but we really had no actual information about how well it would do and what would justify the investment of bringing it back so what we were able to do is say "well, if the fan community is so big, we'll let them tell us whether they want it or not", that was really what the point of view was from the company and how we were able to get the initial investment and how we were able to keep it alive. It's because a fan community spoke very loudly and you're like "yeah, see we knew we were right, but we didn't have any proof", so we needed the crowdfunding campaign to prove it and it was amazing, I owe my whole career at Avalon Hill thanks to all those people who jumped on that crowdfunding campaign because I honestly knew I was like "well, I play a lot of games, big fan of games, I don't go to Hasbro Pulse for things like I knew it would be, it'd be an uphill battle and a lot of Education there" but people love Hero Quest so much, they were willing to do it which I'm extremely thankful for and the whole reason the line gets to continue.
K: Very good, very nice. Well, I was thinking in my feeling and I know that you're the one being interviewed here, but I'm sure I'm not alone in this, there's a lot of franchises that have come back a lot of brands that have been revived out of a way to cash on nostalgia, and they're kind of a mixed track record, so I was really nervous at the start thinking like "oh man, they're going to take another thing that I like and kind of just scatter it, and remix it, and change it, one thing that I did look at, and of course it was completely defunct" but this... what was called Tseu Quest, it was called the 25th Anniversary Hero Quest right before, I think Hasbro reacquired everything that they needed and can you tell us anything about was that a big headache for your company? or what did that cause a more negative reaction? or did that maybe get people thinking about Hero Quest, so maybe it indirectly helped out? or what could you say about that, if anything?
POR: I have to be careful. there's some legal things here that are complicated. It was a barrier for us to get started, okay, yeah, it wasn't because of the way Hero Quest has existed outside of any company really managing it had created a lot of hurdles to overcome.
K: So I suppose there's the confusion of it, it took me a few minutes to figure out "okay, maybe this is not the official one and maybe there's something else I should be looking for", thankfully it was far enough along that I was already seeing people that were upset about "oh, I'm not really going to get this product, it's not really going to happen, and I think I know it's a different company, and everything", but the producers of that... I think it was Game Zone Miniatures and, I know, I'm not trying to start any fights here, but they were saying "well, you can either buy our game or you can buy Hasbro's game" and I think maybe some people didn't get what they were asking for, and there were some court stuff that's happening, that neither of us can talk about, but one thing I noticed looking at that product was it seemed like the box kept getting bigger, and they kept adding more things, and there was maybe a core that was the original game, but then they were kind of going off in a new direction and I would have imagined that Hasbro Hero Quest would have been "okay, we're gonna make a modern game that's inspired by Hero Quest", whereas you guys chose to instead pretty much, just do a reprint with a facelift and then a couple of little things tweaked here and there. Can you say anything about that whole development of the decision?
POR: Yeah, you're right. We did a lot of play testing prior to launching anything of course and everything from like let's make a super modern dungeon crawler that has all the tile laying and things you would expect out of a dungeon crawler to how do we simplify it, and make it even easier to play, right? like we were just experimenting and testing. We have a great design team and one of our designers was like "I don't think with this core box we should mess with it, it's great, it's a great game, so if we want to introduce new ideas and new game mechanics let's use expansions to do that", so if anybody who just wants to play the Hero Quest they played back in 1989, they can buy the core box and they can enjoy that, but then we can try to experiment and push things and try to do new things through expansions and then let the players decide the type of Hero Quest experience they want and I think that insight really led to the methodology that we're following today. We see it with Rise of the Dread Moon, you see it with even Frozen Horror, we took things that we knew were working and were great about the original run, but we're trying new things with the online quests, a lot of that is to see and learn from what the players are doing, so we can make it better over time.
K: Very nice, and this is, I think a question that probably gets asked a lot, maybe you're tired of hearing about this, but the fact that Hero Quest is not just one game, I mean you've got the North American rule set, the one that I grew up with, which I think is more the basis of this game, but you've also got the European version, the Japanese version, and maybe some quirks and some other versions too, like the Brazilian version, so what was the discussion, like if you recall, like selecting a version, or maybe reaching for doing research into other versions, because I see you have some of the equipment that's from like the European version thrown in there, a couple tweaks here and there, maybe inspiration with the artwork, so what was that like kind of researching?
POR: That was probably some of the hottest debates we had as a team early right, like what are we is it Morcar Zargon? is it like what are we doing?
K: Grimdead.
POR: [Laughs] and I think we decided we wanted the best of both and I think that's kind of how you ended up with what we have oh yeah we were trying to recreate the original experience for as many players as we could and then it gets complicated especially when you get into some of those European countries which we have a huge fan base in Europe um and you know we didn't we knew the zargon decided we wanted a unified name and we knew that that decision would cause some ripples but we were like for us especially as we try to build the brand out having your like lead villain have two different names it's very confusing
K: he goes by many names
POR: [Laughs] Many... I mean, you are right, but what I mean like we wanted to make it easier for people, especially people who've never played before for us to be able to explain the game and explain things, so yeah we made a lot of judgment on of the two systems and of the two ways they were approached, which one was more successful in its day and which one do we think makes the overall feeling a bit more pulled together.
K: You know I really wish I could snag some European Hero Quest fans and just kind of like interview the,m there's one guy I know, HispaZargon from Spain, who I talk a lot, and he's much more about like researching the historical like background of all these different versions, and there's a few other people like him I think there was one guy online, and I have no idea how representative it is, but he said that he preferred the new game even though it was not the rule set he grew up with, but he was one of those people that like had soured on Games Workshop, and I know from yesterday's interview [with Christopher Nadeau] we're kind of talking about how maybe Games Workshop doesn't get enough credit as far as this whole thing goes, they weren't really the bad guys in this they were working with you guys to come up with the way forward for the game to come out at all because how do you catch lightning in a bottle? how do you get that collaboration with, I suppose all the entanglements of who owns what, when and where?
POR: Games Workshop has been phenomenal to work with. They've been great great partners, Hasbro in general partners, with them on many things.
K: Now they're a British company, is that right?
POR: Yeah they are, so we've got friends who work over there too just from being in the industry and I'm nothing but positive things to say about Games Workshop and their partnership on Hero Quest. They were super cool about it their whole thing was kind of like "hey, we've got all of this stuff that we've been building war against for years and years, we can't just disrupt that by throwing it into Hero Quest randomly, so like what how can we work together, to like kind of suss that stuff out?, but still we're here, they're Hero Quest fans as well, right? and they know a lot of their big fans are big fans because of Hero Quest. They're like "how do we make sure that launch works great but doesn't ruin any of the future plans we have" and that was really what most of the conversations were about. I don't think it was I was like the higher one on this, I've been on it the whole time and I don't think there was a moment in which Games Workshop did not all they wanted to do was try to make it happen, they weren't trying to not make it happen, right? so I think that's the best you could ask for out of any partner is like how do we work together to figure out what's going to work.
K: And I think maybe another part to this guy's criticism, and I always blank on his name and I feel so bad, but I'll have to look him up later, he's on YouTube but anyway, Games Workshop has kind of a reputation for like doing lots of exclusives and for some people that is the hobby like getting into those exclusives. I remember Warhammer Quest, I kept being told Warhammer Quest is so cool, you gotta check it out if you ever, like Hero Quest this is like the next level, and I went to a game shop and they advertised it on the door, they said ask us about Warhammer Quest and it was sold out already like, and they said "yeah, it was here and it was gone like one guy bought them all" and I think some of that fear kind of trickled into this Hero Quest is "oh man, I missed out on the Haslab campaign, oh man, the Guardian Knight comes out and I missed out on that", so I'm sure that was a big headache for you guys, but what was it like getting Hero Quest to retail? how did that happen? did you have anything to do with that?
POR: Yeah, I was ground floor for the whole thing. When you asked me like what my role is, that's the stuff I'm mainly working on, so like criminal marketing perspective, a lot of the like it's the biz dev part and trying to get the game out there, that was exciting and we could only do it because of how much support the Haslab crowdfunding campaign received.
K: Because it got really close and I don't know if you can tell me or not, so Joe Manganiello's last his Crypt of Perpetual Darkness, and then the Tier right below him didn't make it. Were there other tears that we just didn't know about? or we're just never gonna know that was the end?
POR: Well that was the end if we broke passport. I don't know what we would have got into a war room and tried to figure out what we could do.
K: The bag of holding.
POR: [Laughs] If only... I mean, honestly the goal when we launched it to be able to make it was considerably less than it funded for those things kept getting added as we knew as more people were jumping on we started a catching wind of how high it was going to get.
K: So it exceeded expectations.
POR: Dramatically, dramatically, yeah. I remember there was a lot of concern about it not making any like nobody being interested, and not from my team, but from the organization like because we didn't know, we had no idea, we had no real facts to work from besides a lot of passionate people on the internet talking about it, which is great, but there's a lot of things that a lot of passionate people talk about and then it doesn't commercially translate into much.
K: I suppose, I don't know anything about marketing, but I'm trying to imagine if it were my task what would I do, would I just send people out to internet forums saying "hey, check out this link", like how would I get people involved because it's not like the old days where you could put a commercial on during Saturday morning cartoons, or put up some billboards, or rely on like a magazine, so maybe you've got people that supported other Haslab projects in the past like the katana for Return of the Jedi, but so many people just didn't even know about it, I mean people like me who never support stuff like that, like you hear Kickstarter, like ah I'll just wait till it shows up at Walmart, so was there, you know? what was the strategy for trying to reach people?
POR: What you're describing, I know you look around here and you see a team of Avalon Hill folks at the time of that Hero Quest launch, there were two of us and a part-time person, there wasn't a depth event, or a depth the budget, it was seriously people who wanted to see the game come back and we were trying to figure out how we could do it, and we were jumping on forums, we did it, we did a live stream, we got Joe, Joe was a big fan of Hero Quest, and thank goodness he had been doing some work with Dungeons and Dragons, and when he found out we were doing Hero Quest, he jumped on, so he helped us with a lot of the awareness driving early, but yeah...
K: Yeah, I remember that, and I was never a D&D player. I think I maybe played it three times in my life and it's always been like Star Wars or something else like that, and I think a lot of people were confused by that because they were thinking, well what's Hasbro thinking, I mean Dungeons and Dragons is this totally different game, they're going to see Hero Quest and go, this is like a training wheels game, like it's why would I play this? and I don't remember was there already, a my first adventure like Dungeons and Dragons game already, so what were you guys doing, or thinking that you needed to do, to differentiate Hero Quest to the world to show that it was different than Dungeons and Dragons, and maybe you wouldn't have to be a fan of one, to be a fan of the other, or you could enjoy both in different ways?
POR: I think it's the second. I think they actually fulfill different play occasions, use cases, and different people. I play a ton of Dungeons and Dragons, I'm a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan, huge Hero Quest fan. I don't play a lot of Warhammer, I want to get into it, but then I'm always worn don't because it's going to be a lot of work, it's a lot of work for a lot of people, that is the hobby, is the collecting, and the painting, and all that, but I think they're different, and I think the play is different, and I think the type of people you can play with are different, are we a thing we say to each other all the time about, what we're trying to achieve is we want to be able to develop games that have depth, but you're allowed to jump right into and start playing a mantra we say to each other is, no sprues, no homework, no prep, and you should be able to be able to play, you should be able to pop the box open, look at it and dive in, and Hero Quest fulfills that betrayal, fulfills that, and that was what we really love about those games because I think "look I love your giant Euro game, and all those, but it's hard to play those with your friends because you don't have enough time to play them", but you do want a satisfying game experience, that doesn't take forever?, and I don't know I'm rambling a little bit, but my point is Dungeons and Dragons is an event within itself, that is several hours just to get started. Hero Quest isn't that, and that's part of its superpower, I think.
K: Well, I noticed that Dungeons and Dragons or, I guess Wizards of the Coast now, but TSR before that, and all that they've been trying for decades to do, what Hero Quest does, is get people into the hobby using a simplified or more attractive to the eye type of game with colorful miniatures. I'm thinking of like Dragon Strike, with the VHS tape, trying to get you hyped up, yeah. Still to this day, they're doing it. and Warhammer... Games Workshop does the same thing. It's like "okay, you've got your 40K, and you've got your Age of Sigmar, and your RPG", but then they still do stuff like Kill Team and Fire Team. I bought Fire Team, of course it was on sale, but I was like "okay, they're simplifying the game for someone like me, who doesn't want to sit down for four hours, learning some system, and then have an even harder time getting my friends to play it". I will say it was a challenge to get people, I know, to try Hero Quest for the first time because they still have that idea that this looks complicated, "I like these little monsters you've got, but this looks complicated", and then I have to show them it really isn't that complicated. I mean people who play like maybe deck building games, or something else that just doesn't click the same way, so I know early on it was, I think I had this perception and maybe a lot of people did of D&D is dice, and your imagination, and paper, and this looks more like a board game, with like little toys, that you move around, but I don't have to do a lot of preparation, like painting them and messing with sprues, and glue, and all that sort of thing... is that still the appeal to Hero Quest, or is it something different now that people are looking for, that you're using to market it?
POR: Yeah, I do think it is. I mean, obviously the painting community is huge. People are painting them, and again, go as deep as you want with anything, right? I try to paint, I'm pretty sloppy, but that's I'm not an art director.
K: I've even tried my hand on it and I am infamous for just doing one color.
POR: Yeah, I mean it's fun to do and I get it, and some people are really good at it and they love it... I don't know, it's hard for me in this moment to say that a singular appeal of Hero Quest, because I think again it's multi-generational and depending on your age, and who you're playing with, I think the appeal kind of changes. I'll use this example, I have a five-year-old little girl and she's not your regular five-year-old because she lives with me, and I game a lot. She knows there's like daddy stacks of games and her stacks of games, but Hero Quest is one that we will sort of play together again. She's five, so the monsters don't really attack too often, but she's got to dodge them and run around them, and she loves a little furniture, she loves the pieces, she loves the Quests and the objectives, and we bond over that in a way that I couldn't with any other game really.
K: That's great.
POR: Yeah and she'll hopefully grow up, and as she still is passionate about it as she gets older, and then our love of that game will change based of where she's at developmentally, but that's way different than I'm sure you and a group of friends hanging out on a Saturday to play Hero Quest, and try some new things, or home brew some new rules, or play with the sandbox that it is, but that's also one of the great things about it, right? like the home brewing is fun and I love reading about it online like what people are adding, and how they're adding new move mechanics to an Abomination, or how they're thinking about different things, and that again, you can do that in that game because it's kind of more a contained sandbox like that.
K: And I was thinking at one time that there was maybe even hostility between Dungeons and Dragons players and Hero Quest players, but I think that's maybe a false perception I had because the D&D players that I met were very open to like "oh, you're playing this game well here, let me help you out" and at first it's like "oh, they're gonna help me out and guide me into their game", but actually some of the homebrew things that I added to my Hero Quest are kind of D&D-esque, and at the same token, I see them doing more improvisational and simplification like they've got their big core rulebook that they've memorized, but they're like "yeah, it's your first game, let's just simplify what it happened", you know?
POR: Worry about that edge case or that scenario right now, yeah, for sure.
K: More of that casual welcoming game thing because I think there's a stereotype of D&D players... is very the rules lawyers, the people who fight about the exact thing, and they have superstitions about dice and like all this weird stuff that people just find goofy, and it's just like I just want to play a game and have some fun, is that so wrong? but they're not all like that.
POR: Well, and I would say as a Dungeons and Dragons players, that community, has changed a lot in my lifetime. There's a lot of new players and a lot more role play. Do you see that? well I guess that's probably thanks to critical role or something, but yeah even the D&D player I think has evolved.
K: Well, it was interesting getting the perspective of a friend of mine because I've introduced Hero Quest to several people who've never played before. I think I told Chris [Nadeau] this... when I did the Frozen Horror, I literally started with people who had never played before because I'm like "listen, I'm going to show you what happens when you bring a new person in..." and they were saying "wow, this game is like all combat, like all the time, all you're doing is rolling for combat" it's like "well, you're doing more stuff" because I think of Hero Quest as being an exploration game because I compare it to something like Space Crusade, where you are just fighting and killing, and fighting and killing, and then you're done, and it's like "wow, what happened, it goes fast", but Hero Quest is a little more meandering, but then I guess D&D can be the long game, even more it's like the Axis and Allies of role-playing games, but some people prefer that I think is Hero Quest the type of game that you can scale for people who want a quick casual game, versus someone who wants a long drawn out experience.
POR: Yeah, I think so .I think it's how you treat the gameplay session as well, I think it's... I don't know, this is just my opinion, I think it's easier to play a singular Dungeons and Dragons session for four hours, than it is to play Hero Quest. If you want to play Hero Quest for four hours, you're probably playing multiple Quests, or chaining something together, but the board's only so big, you only have so many tiles, it's more limited in that sense than Dungeons and Dragons, but that's also good, right? because you can go get lunch, you can play for an hour, get lunch and play for another hour, so again it's a different, it's back to what I was saying earlier, it's a play occasion thing too "hey, I want my friends to come over" and as I mentioned, I have kids, a lot of my friends now have kids, they're gonna come over for two hours and then have to go home, you can't really get a satisfying Dungeons and Dragons session in two hours, you didn't get a good Hero Quest session in.
K: I was about to say it's like the fast food, but then that makes it sound like it's unsatisfying.
POR: I've tried to use this analogy, tell me what you think.
K: I don't know if it's perfect.
POR: But if compared to like Blizzard titles, Dungeons and Dragons is World of Warcraft, where Hero Quest is more Diablo, where like Diablo's more focused on a specific part of the adventure, where as Dungeons and Dragons isn't really. Even focused on the dungeon art anymore, it's much more broad, it's not a perfect one-to-one by any stretch of the imagination, but I do feel like it kind of paints, like it's not as open world, you're not exploring towns as often like that kind of thing, I don't know...
K: I was almost thinking of like Gauntlet Legends or something.
POR: Yeah, yeah, Gauntlet, thats a great game, yeah.
K: Yeah, I love original Gauntlet and this is, I guess, it's neither here nor there, I think Gauntlet Legends was one of the few times I saw like a remake of a classic arcade game where I thought it actually improved and I love Gauntlet too.
POR: Yeah, I agree. That game sucked a lot of quarters out of me back in the day, you know?
K: The red warrior needed food badly, and it's like "what are you going to do about it?" yeah, fair let you get back. Is there anything else you want to say about, maybe the future of Hero Quest? or how you see things going from here?
POR: I guess, as I mentioned earlier, I feel very fortunate. I just started at Hasbro when this whole ride started and it was my first project and I've gotten to work on ,and now we got to go to Gen Con. We had to do all these things, and really that is thanks to the player community, and a lot of that is thanks to the Hero Quest like a lot. It sticks to the Hero Quest player community, so I'm very appreciative because it was just a few years ago. I was designing my own bad board games and hoping to work in the industry and now this is, I get to do now, I get to do this every day. It's really surreal, that's good too personal, but I'm from Chicago and I used to come to Gen Con, and just hang out and like look at like dream, and now it's like I'm in it and I'm doing it, and a big part of that is Hero Quest, so I'm thankful and appreciative. I think on the future of it, it's like for every expansion pack or core game that somebody picks up helps me be able to make the next one, so I'm always watching really the math of it to make sure we can continue investing in it, so it's like if the players are still excited and happy for the next thing to drop, we'll be able to continue to make them, and we have plans for a couple of years .I know there's been some stuff on the internet and you can just kind of start to see parts of that road map, and there's a lot of the work I'm doing is like, honestly thinking about 2026-2027 like. That's where my head ends up going most of the time, that's because it takes years for the thing to actually happen.
K: That's the hardest part I think, because it's not like a video game, well, I guess video games take a long time to develop too, but that idea that, oh, man you gotta like you could be, I'm saying the wrong turn, but you send it to the printers and you got to design the molds and there's all this waiting and...
POR: Yeah and you gotta get the investment, you've got to get the team like you gotta get the people hired to do it, the right people to do it, and all that just takes time. You have to... if you need an agreement with some partner, that it just takes a while, and so you end up planning a couple years into the future, and not that the stuff happening next year or 2025 isn't, couldn't change, or us make a new thing, or us like react, but it's a development cycle and every time like. I guess my point is as we continue to get support today, that will actually help us support it longer term as well, because the ball starts moving. I'm really excited for the releases, I'm so happy Rise came out, Rise of the Dread Moon, because that's the first chance we had to create an all-original thing, hopefully, I mean, I'm watching reviews very closely, and watching all the videos that get posted. Hopefully it's liked and we can continue to do more originals. The re-releases are great as well, but as a team of creative folks, it's fun to make new things.
K: You want to leave your stamp or your mark on it?
POR: You just want nobody gets into this business, who doesn't love to create. You're here to make, you're here... we're all creators of different kinds, that's what we want to do.
K: Not just a cover band.
POR: Yeah, right. Well, what we'll say is like blow the dust off an old box. That's kind of what we did with the core game, right? which is great and we did some good stuff there, but it's fun to create and I hope we'll see what happens with Rise, we'll do more if people like it a lot, we'll do more reprints if that's what people are interested in as well, it's really up to the player community.
K: Sorry, I'm thinking of extra questions... let me know if you still got time... do you have a... whose decision was it to get Stephen Baker on the project?
POR: I'll take credit. I don't know if it was or not Stephen Baker's, an awesome dude and he doesn't live far from our headquarters, so a friend of mine out at the company had his phone number, so he just called him and asked him and he said "Yeah, cool, let's go!" like. It was really the most... that's why, I don't know, it was really the most easy nonchalant thing was to even did get Stephen Baker to do it. He was in we like, he had worked at Hasbro, around Hasbro up, until like maybe four years before we brought it back, so a lot of people already knew him, so it wasn't... yeah he's again one of the nicest guys I've ever met.
K: That was my impression too. I just sent him an e-mail one time saying that I really appreciate the work he did, and he was very nice gracious about it. I think maybe some people have this impression that, I guess when you think of like big personalities like George Lucas and Star Wars like, you're thinking like he's gonna block in and like have his head down because, oh, everyone's messing with my thing, but now that I've heard many stories about it, is really Hero Quest was a collaboration from the beginning, he had to go back to the drawing board a couple of times before we got the game that we kind of experienced, so I guess he's a seasoned enough guy, that he wasn't like intimidated by this, he was... you guys weren't having like big struggle sessions about who's gonna do it?
POR: No, the energy was not anywhere close to like, there were no problems, it was everybody trying to make something people would love to play and that's what makes guys like Stephen Baker great . That's his motive what motivates him, it wasn't an ego motivated thing, it was really a how do we bring the game back, and how do we make it something well I'll love to be a part of...
K: And I think when I first heard that, he was going to be having his own Quest in the Haslab campaign, I thought "oh, it's just like a celebrity endorsement", like "well, we'll get Joe Manganiello, we'll get Stephen Baker", but when I actually read through that Quest and... I haven't played it yet, to my shame many other people have, but I just on every page there's lore and there's surprises, and there's gimmicks in a good way, and you could just tell that he was just like almost... I hate to say like a kid again, but it's like he talks about going back, and it's like so many things have changed in the industry, but he's right back there and he's trying to think back what was I thinking back then to make these Quests, and it really kind of felt like the old magic, so to speak, so that was really encouraging to see.
POR: Those Quests those guys made like we helped produce, but those they made, those and they a lot of phone calls about their vision and their dream like what they wanted it to be, but there was no... it wasn't like we made it and they signed some contract where we could use their names. They sat there, they wrote them, they did the work.
K: Yeah, it was kind of like a celebrity writer but the fact that I mean... Stephen Baker's still, he's doing the narration for the videos, "wait a minute, that voice sounds familiar", it's like and you know Chris [Nadeau] comes on to the rant cast of all places like "really it's like that's him" and he's like wow, okay, well we have a devin chat, first of all and second of all, and we appreciate that communication, so Stephen Baker does work for you guys sometimes? I guess he's an independent...
POR: Yeah, he is an independent game designer now, he's a lot of games because publishers don't always credit the designer, but he is part of it, just a whole other thing that we probably shouldn't get into here, but he's behind a lot of games that come out and are quite popular, but he tends to do a little more recently, a little more family-ish games, but he's definitely in the industry, he comes over to headquarters and will talk to us, and we'll see what he's working on, we'll talk Hero Quest.
K: I'd love to meet him someday, but I don't know if that'll ever happen.
POR: Yeah, he's a nice man.
K: So, are any of the other people who did those guest art, and the guest Quest, are they still working on anything with Hero Quest or can you say?
POR: Okay, that's probably as much, yeah, I think and I'm sure you know that if you find someone you like to work with, you work with them more like. I just think there's a lot of people that are hard to work with, so when you find someone that.
K: Oh, we got the project done.
POR: Yeah, exactly, and that's how you vibe with people if you find somebody who they see, we can share a vision together, we'll keep working with them.
K: Maybe this last question is not the most interesting thing in the world but I feel like it gets asked to be a lot, and I feel like I don't explain it very well, but what is the difference between Avalon Hill and Wizards of the Coast, in relation to Hasbro, if there is any?
POR: We're a specific group with a specific charge, different budget, where we are, while we all work for Hasbro and we all kind of have at a certain level, we all high up you, all report to the same people who are managing the businesses. We have different goals and different teams, and slightly different team structures depending on what we're making, right? like if you think about Magic, all these, them as an example tcgs to make a TCG is a lot different than making a Monopoly. The skill sets required, the pacing, the phasing of projects... all that's much different, so they're specialized in that and they're really great at that. They probably would struggle to make a Monopoly, right? they don't know how to mold zinc, I don't know, I don't maybe you do Magic.
K: Magicopoly...
POR: [Laughs] I'm not trying to dog Monopoly in their zinc molding skills. My point is it's just a different skill set and different group of designers, something that we bring to the table too is we are getting really great at developing our miniatures, our 3D molds, our printing. How we think about making those, we're getting much more efficient and better at...
K: We've noticed.
POR: Thank you it's been a lot of work and we want to be great at it. I think day one we want to be great at it, but it takes time to get better and better, and again that's different, that's a different charge, different team, different skills required to do that than you would on Twister, right? it's different, so that's how we're structured, and again it's all at the service of the player at the end of the day, and you're servicing a very different player for Hero Quest than you are, again using Twister as my example, than you are for a Twister, it requires different things...
K: And I suppose maybe it's a totally different ball game when you have something like Heroescape going to Renegade Studios and them making Heroscape for you guys, but then, what if there's, let's say, okay, I'll use practical example... what if there's something in Dungeons and Dragons that you really want to put into Hero Quest? is there a lot of paperwork to get that in? or get to talk to somebody, or is it just "oh, yeah we all own the same IP and go for it"? or vice versa?
POR: I wish it was that easy, it's not. I wouldn't really say it's paperwork, but there's a lot, the more Partners you involve the more complicated it is, so it just takes more time, and Dungeons and Dragons, if you think about D&D, it's got its whole development track, that it's on we have our development track that we're on. If we want to cross those, we have to find the points in which they can align, which isn't always right when you want like. For our needs it might be earlier than they're ready, or later, or whatever, so that's really... because again, everybody I think is trying to do what's best for their brands and for their players, so it's finding those points of alignment that becomes more difficult when it comes to things like Renegade. Renegade's a great partner of our similar to Games Workshop, right? and I think a big part benefit of being in the Hasbro corporate structure is you get to make things with partners that you wouldn't be able to make with Hasbro just because of the way tooling works, factories work, print orders work... it's actually a very logistical thing, so when something goes over to Renegade it's not that Chris [Nadeau] and Craig Van Ness, who's standing right over there, are not involved in it anymore, it's just that we're not manufacturing it anymore. From a development perspective the work is there, it's just not getting printed in one of our shops, and of course they have a team of developer. I'm not trying to say that they're not doing a ton of work either.
K: I was going to say how many of those designs are still going to go with the next one, but you don't.
POR: I can't partnership, they have a lot of Hasbro properties, they also have Axis and Allies now, and they have others because they're great partners and they do great work great.
K: Well, that helps a lot and I suppose I should ask Chris [nadeau] about this because with the D&D question, I was thinking okay, so if you guys are making a cleric, you're going to have to look at the D&D Cleric and make sure it's not the same, but then it turns out, he's like a shaolin monk, or something different which we're just discovering now at the conference, but I guess I can ask him those questions unless you had something you wanted to say about it.
POR: Well, no. I think it's important for us not to step on D&D. We don't want to be D&D and D&D doesn't want us to be D&D.
K: So no crossover adventures in the future.
POR: I would never say, I don't know... I mean, who knows, and also like I might not be in the beginning they'll change, I have no idea.
K: Well, we the fans can make it happen if we want to, but it's...
POR: And if you ask loud enough, it might officially happen too because, again, that's a big part of it. I don't know, I always get a little personally unsure of what to do with a D&D character within the Hero Quest world without it breaking the Hero Quest world, I'm not sure if we... maybe we'll figure it out someday, I don't know, we've played around with it conceptually, but they are different universes and they might both have fantasy involved, but they're different so...
K: Yeah, interdimensional gateways.
POR: Yeah, of course you could do some portal things, yeah whatever sci-fi trope you want to like. There's a lot of things, we could do a multiverse, which I'm so sick of those that "I will never, I don't want to do that..."
K: They are kind of being done to death but...
POR: Too many multiverses man, too many... I can't even Star Trek's got multiverse stuff going on, and I'm like...
K: Yeah, when are we getting Star Wars versus Star Trek? and how bad is that going to be?
POR: It would be terrible and let's see if Disney buys Paramount, right?
K: But in the world of board games, it could be glorious if you wanted it to.
POR: Yeah and as a player you can do that, you could easily take like Star Trek Adventures and mod some Star Wars characters in there, and play that fantasy out as much as you want.
K: I want to see Picard in a stormtrooper outfit.
POR: You'd suddenly get much worse with his phaser.
K: Yeah, yeah, it could be great... all right, well, thank you Patrick for your time.
POR: Thank you so much. I appreciate it, great to meet you.
End of interview.
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Links to many other relevant interviews about HeroQuest are compiled in thread.
