by Wargames & military history specialist Henry Hyde performed a great live interview with legend Rick Priestley and John Stallard on December 2009, which was later published in 2010 in magazine Miniature Wargames with Battlegames. You can found a downloadable PDF with the full interview uploaded by Henry here.
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...
John Stallard is a game designer, one of the former CEO's of Games Workshop during the 90's, and co-founder of Warlord Games Company at the time of the interview.
The interview was performed in Stallard's home in Nothingham UK. Unfortunatelly, the interview does not reveal any relevant detail about HeroQuest, except just some impressions they had about the game, which I think worth sharing here as an extract, specially considering they were made 15 years ago, when not too many interviews were done.
Thanks to Henry Hyde for performing this interesting interview.
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EXTRACT OF INTERVIEW WITH RICK PRIESTLEY AND JOHN STALLARD by Henry Hyde, performed in Dec 2009 and published in 2010 at magazine Miniature Wargames with Battlegames
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[They were talking about how was Warhammer 1st Edition back in the day...]
Henry Hyde (HH): So, what were the first Warhammer races? Did you already have the races fully formed at that point?
Rick Priestley (RP): Yes, because the Warhammer game was developed to allow people to make use of the collections they already had. So, we looked at the range, and took copies of every single thing, all the blister pack and bag notes, and those became the races that were then incorporated into the game.
John Stallard (JS): For a long time, people were just mail-ordering Citadel Miniatures because they could, because they loved the models and in their heads, I think they thought of the armies they might like to play with, but they weren’t doing anything with them, it was just lead under the bed, or painted up as little warbands, but nobody did anything with them. Until Bryan had said to Rick, “Write us a set of rules”, the vast majority of those miniatures were just going to collectors.
RP: And a typical mail order when I joined was just one of this, one of those, three of them… They were being bought by people who were, at best, playing roleplaying games. Then we started to do regiment deals, like “Buy 20 orcs with a leader and a standard bearer and a musician”, or “Buy an army deal, get these 20 orcs and those 20 orcs and these other 20 orcs and you’ve got an army” and so on. So, we started to sell armies… It wasn’t that we invented a world or a background for a game and then made models for it, we had a vast range of models already…
JS: …including Ral Partha, from America, which we made under license.
RP: And we also did RuneQuest figures under licence, Traveller figures under license, Star Trek under license, War of the Worlds, we made a range of gangsters, spaceships, Marlburians, Romans, Arabs… So, it was a very diverse range. The reason why the Warhammer world has got these human races in was because we made historical toy soldiers – mostly medieval, of course.
HH: Sure, I’ve got some of them! And of course I also remember things like HeroQuest and Advanced HeroQuest from the mid-1980s.
RP: Yes, from Milton Bradley.
HH: That was a great game, and I loved the miniatures, particularly some of the barbarian figures.
RP: I set up the first design studio after mail order, and that was in Newark, in a separate office, and then when we moved to Eastwood on the outskirts of Nottingham, the studio was in the top floor of an office block, and then soon after that we moved into Nottingham, a place in Low Pavement, and that was when we did the HeroQuest under license.
JS: Opinion is divided on how well HeroQuest did for Workshop. But I can tell you from the front line, recruiting managers and staff for Workshop, how many of them were recruited as a result of HeroQuest, and it ran into the hundreds. It was a terrific game.
HH: I’ve had games of HeroQuest with people who would never, ever consider playing a wargame under any other circumstances. Great game, and I’ve got a very soft spot for it. And I also remember that curious book that came out, Heroes for Wargames?
[The conversation between Rick, John and Henry continues deriving in different topics...]
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Links to many other relevant interviews about HeroQuest are compiled in this thread.
