by Wargames & military history specialist Henry Hyde performed a great live interview with legend Rick Priestley in his podcast series called Battlechat 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...
The interview is really interesting for any lover of Games Workshop products of old era, and I think it gives some relevant details about the the duality between HeroQuest and Advanced heroquest, so I think worth sharing here an extract of such part of the conversation.
I have to admit that Rick Priestley has shocked me in this interview when he didn't remember the name of Stephe Baker, the creator of HeroQuest... What surprises me is not that he didn't remember his name... what surprised me is that it is not the first interview where I see a Games Workshop legend, slightly involved in the development of HeroQuest, who doesn't remember the name of Stephen Baker (let's check this Jervis Johnson's interview here), which it is starting to be rather suspicious, in my humble opinion.
The interview has a second part audio, recorded some days later, which can be listened here. I also listened to it, but no more HeroQuest is mentioned there.
Thanks to Henry Hyde for performing this interesting interview.
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EXTRACT OF INTERVIEW WITH RICK PRIESTLEY by Henry Hyde, performed in Jun 2019 at his podcast website Battlechat
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[They were talking about the the times when Warhammer was being created, audio minute 35:00 ...]
Henry Hyde (HH): Looking at my notes here from 2010, I can remember you saying that you all had a really broad kind of fantasy influences. You mentioned, Philip Jose Farmer there as well, in the old notes...
Rick Priestley (RP): Yeah. Sure.
HH: And, of course, with the Dungeons & Dragons, I remember there's a comment you made back in 2010. D&D came out and when Richard Halliwell and I first saw it, we thought they've stolen our ideas. [laughs]
RP: Yeah. It did. It seemed very much like the sort of thing we were doing, and had been doing for a while. You know, narratively driven adventuring in a fantasy context.
We tended to do everything on the tabletop, so what we were doing was kind of tabletop skirmish war games, I suppose. But they had that same element of continuation and advancement in terms of characters, not to the same extent I think D&D turned it into something a bit more abstract. You know, a high level character could have a thousand tonne weight drop on his head and take only a number of hit points and survive it. It had that, which actually works very well as a computer game mechanic. That's why D&D, provided all the computer game mechanics. You know, you have that little health bar, don't you? The health bar goes down and down and down. You never get, oh, you've been stabbed fatally by a small goblin who suddenly appeared out of the shadows. [laughs] That could never happen in the computer game. You just ding. You just hit a little bot. So there was in a sense, they weren't realistic but that mechanic, I think, translates very well. Whereas the Reaper percentage mechanic, there was always a small percentage of a fatal hit. Oh, no. You've rolled double zero. Let's roll on the fatal fatally surprised chart.
HH: Because that is an interesting thing because my, first experiences in Dungeons & Dragons actually were there were no miniatures involved whatsoever. It was kind of the pure D&D where you had the Dungeon Master with his Dungeon Master's guide book and all the players with their, you know, the player's book and what have you and bits of paper. And it was all done in the imagination.
RP: So was ours. We didn't play when we played D&D, which we did a bit. It was absolutely a pen and paper game. It wasn't, there were no choice holders involved. Because, I mean, we played everything, you know. We had the SPI board games and, you know, the Avalon Hill board games. We played those, and we'd quite cheerfully play, our zat and, all you know, we played lots of games.
HH: Absolutely. And I'm I'm trying to think. The first kind of dungeon sort of game that I encountered where I did use miniatures was, Advanced Heroquest. Which, of course, Games Workshop was selling for a time back in the... oh, I'm thinking, early nineteen nineties?
RP: Yes. It was it was quite a bit later. Yeah. I never played it.
HH: Didn't you?
RP: Or even the dungeon crawl... in the original word...?
HH: HeroQuest.
RP: HeroQuest. Yeah.
HH: Yeah, that was a great game because the thing that I, is noteworthy about that game for me is it's the game that I introduced completely non wargaming people to wargaming with. We'd actually have Heroquest dinner parties where we'd eat dinner or eat a course and then do a bit of dungeoning and eat another course and do a bit more dungeoning and then finish off the dungeon after dinner. With people who normally would just turn their nose up but they loved because it was so visual and they had those lovely kind of printed corridor sections and little plastic doors and the miniatures were cracking little miniatures of the Skaven and you know big butch heroes and an Elf and a Dwarf and a Wizard. Yeah it worked out really well. That was a that was a cool game. But because that was a game, wasn't it, that you that you'd bought in, that Games Workshop bought in from elsewhere, didn't you?
RP: It was her Milton Bradley, I think. What happened was sometime in the I suppose it might have been late eighties or early nineties, we entered a relationship with because we were always looking for things to do. I mean, we designed games to sell in WA Smiths at one point. We were all it's that classic kind of silver bullet mentality that so many people have. We were looking to do things that weren't just it's ironic now, of course, because Games Workshop is a multimillion pound company selling nothing to all intents and purposes but Warhammer 40K. I mean, yes, it sells a bit of Warhammer and essentially, it sells nothing that we or we didn't do and which I wasn't part which I was part of. But in those days, that wasn't the case. There was a feeling that the money might be in board games or it might be in, live action role play. We looked at that. We had a record company for god's sakes.
HH: Oh, did you? I didn't know that. [laughs]
RP: Yeah. We're on a record. Yeah. We did. He was Brian had a very kind of broad ambition. And we sold clothing in the shops, you know, the T-shirts and things like that. There was a we just went all over the place. And that's how we got in touch with or rather, Milton Bradley probably got in touch with us. They saw we were successful in our field, and they were looking for an in into their board game market. And one of their staff... I really can't remember his name, which is annoying... But one of their staff was a wargamer, and he created the HeroQuest game. And they came to us to make the miniatures. So it was a cooperative venture in which we actually made the miniatures. And they designed the game. And we had the rights then to make an Advanced version of HeroQuest, and we produced something called Advanced Heroquest. Yeah. So, it was that that relationship. And Milton Bradley did so well out of it. It became like their biggest seller. I think it was it was a major thing for them. And then we did Space Crusade, and there are a few other things, but it petered out in the end.
HH: Yeah. I mean, from my point of view, that was kind of the first contact that I had really with Games Workshop. I'd kind of seen it around, but, there was one opened in Brighton when I'd just moved down to Brighton. And so I I just went in there, had a look around as you do. I have a bit of, oh, and I just saw this box game I thought oh that looks really interesting and turned it over because it had one of the things I loved about it had pictures of the miniatures and stuff on the back of the box. And I just thought oh that looks interesting these little rat men things. Well it turned out I I've been in love with the Skaven ever since as a Warhammer race. You know? I've loved them, but they were the first ones that I came into contact with through Advanced Heroquest. So, Games Workshop earned quite a lot of money from me as a result of that. [laughs] Now the thing is, of course, you had your finger in so many pies by the time, you had a longish career at Games Workshop, and you end up with your finger with so many pies. It all started, of course, with kind of the Space Rogue that became Warhammer 40K thing as well, didn't it? You know, as the the it became the biggest which became probably well, has to be surely the biggest game on Earth.
RP: Yeah. Probably is. That's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Road Trader, as it was originally called, was actually a game I'd, it was based on a game that I'd written before I joined Games Workshop. And it was actually it's one of those things that I resisted working at Games Workshop for quite a while because I wanted to make it on my own as a sculptor. Difficult job. Late nights, not much not terribly lucrative, in those days. But, when Brian offered me the job doing mail order, it was on the understanding that at some point, they published Rogue Trader. And they never did publish that game because, actually, that game was quite a slight thing. It was, a spaceship game, in fact. And, but it had the essence of the races mapped out. And then when we came to do, our sort of science fiction version of Warhammer, it kind of the two melded. And I just picked up on a lot of the stuff which I'd done for Rogue Trader and the name which we had to use by then because everyone was asking us when Rogue Trader is because we'd made the mistake of advertising it. In one of the central journals, I think it was. Yeah. So every time we had an event, people would come up to me and say, when's Rogue Trader coming out? So we had to call the Warhammer 40.000 it was a Warhammer science fiction game. We had to call it Rogue Trader just to get that off the off the table. And at the time, we also sold we had a relationship with the 2,000 AD people, and it's Titan Publishing at the time. And we produced a game called Rogue Trooper based on their comic strip. And that's why Warhammer 40,000 is called Warhammer 40,000. Because we couldn't call it we we decided we couldn't actually just call it Rogue Trader because it would confuse people because we sold something called Rogue Trooper. The salesman will never cope. [laughs]
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Links to many other relevant interviews about HeroQuest are compiled in this thread.
