by Blogger and HeroQuest lover Rafa el Vikingo published on January 2024 a not so common interview with Jordi Ferré. Jordi is not one of those "superstars" around HeroQuest creation who are usually interviewed by media, however in my opinion Jordi was one of those key actors of the hobby back in the day.
Jordi Ferré was one of the very first employees of Games Workshop's Studio in Spain, in the early 90's, and he was the responsible of translating to Spanish language most of the Games Workshop products at the time, including White Dwarf magazine. He saw the birth of the first Games Workshop's store in Spain, located in Barcelona city, year 1993, and worked there, but he was already working at other game stores before that, therefore his testimony and knowledge about how those days happened I think have a great value today.
The full interview was published here by Rafa in his website. It is written in perfect Spanish language, however I have translated to English some paragraphs that I think would be of your interest, which you may find below.
Jordi was not too familiarized about HeroQuest because it was not a pure GW product, but he talks about his memories around the game at the shop he was working at the time, and he also explained some other industrial details about the HeroQuest miniatures distribution. There is also another interesting passage in the interview where Jordi explains that he translated all Warhammer Quest game to Spanish... revealing that he translated the full Role-playing Book of that game, which never finally saw the light in Spain! It is well known that the Spanish version of the game was the only one without including such book (and other components) to reduce costs by GW, but now, thanks to Jordi and Rafa we finally know that such official translation to Spanish actually existed back in the day (fans of the game translated it anyway some years ago by their own, but that's another story)... so, some new discoveries with this interview, which I encourage you to read completely.
Thanks to Jordi and my friend Rafa el Vikingo for performing this great interview.
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EXTRACT OF INTERVIEW WITH JORDI FERRÉ by Rafa el Vikingo, published the 12th of January 2024 at Rafa el Vikingo's website 'heroquester.eu'
- Today we bring you an interview with one of the people most involved with Games Workshop in our country [Spain]. He started working at the Games Workshop Spain studio in 1993, going through various positions, and became editor-in-chief of the Spanish edition of White Dwarf (WD) magazine in 1997. His last WD in the position was #160 in 2008, being around 16 years in the orbit of Games Workshop Spain. I want to thank Jordi for his time, and for being such a friendly person and passionate about the hobby. I also want to thank Alberto from the podcast "El Enano Blanco 30" for his invaluable help.
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WARHAMMER QUEST (1995)
Rafa el Vikingo (ReV): What was your role and that of GW Spain in the launch of the game? Was it just translation or something else? How do you remember the launch of the game in Spain? What did you think of the Spanish edition compared to the English one? The Spanish version has important cuts compared to the English one (Role-playing Book, fewer monster miniatures like the Minotaur.) Do you know the reason(s) for this shortened version that they released in Spain?
Jordi Ferré (JF): We, at GW Studio, were only in charge of the translation, which was a huge pain due to the amount of material, and a pain for the layout artists, who didn't know how to place the text, which was already very dense in English.
I'm surprised by what you say about the cuts. As far as I know, it was exactly the same (in fact, the Role-playing Book was the most problematic to translate due to length, density...). I can't verify this because I was never interested in it, and as soon as we got our copy I gave the Skaven miniatures to a friend (I think I mentioned it in some chapter of the El Enano Blanco 30) and left the box with the rest of the material in a gaming club where I was... and where it gathered dust because nobody used it, except on some occasions the floor templates to use them for some other real role-playing game.
[Note by HispaZargon: Interesting to see that Jordi translated to Spanish the complete UK version of the Warhammer Quest game, however he was not finally aware about the cuts introduced by Games Workshop in the final Spanish version. From interviews to Games Workshop designers at the time, like Gavin Thorpe, it looked true that Warhammer Quest was a game with really low margins for GW due to the huge ammount of material included in the box, so probably this enocurage them to introduce that cuts soon than later, and Spanish version was the victim]
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HERO QUEST AND ADVANCED HEROQUEST (1989)
ReV: In an episode of El Enano Blanco 30 you mentioned that the miniatures for this game [HeroQuest] were created by GW and that they had total control over them, even sending the plastic sprues directly from England to MB in Spain. Do you have any additional information you would like to share about what the relationship or agreement was between GW and MB to produce and distribute the game?
JF: My only relationship with them was selling them in the Jocs&Games store where I worked before GW (and I think in another one where I worked on a Christmas campaign as well). From this stage I only remember that one Christmas campaign there was such a huge purchase that we didn't know where to put them. In fact, there was more linear shelves than usual dedicated to the game, and as soon as one was sold it was replenished on the shelf to make room in the warehouse. I think it was with HeroQuest that I literally made a tower with boxes of the game, not only as "propaganda", but also to empty the warehouse a bit.
The fact that they bought so many instead of restocking, I was told, was because MB closed Christmas sales at the end of November, and then didn't start serving orders again until mid-January, so you had to make a good enough forecast if you didn't want to run out of goods on peak sales days.
Regarding the production of the game, I understand that GW actually took care of the miniatures 100%, that they not only designed them, but also manufactured them, and then ship the sprues to the MB factory (or Diseños Orbitales company in the case of Advanced Heroquest), so that they could put them in the box with the other components. I don't know anything else.
There was a rumor that said that they created Warhammer Quest without MB was partly because they were not happy with the relationship between the two companies because of the other games.
[The interview continues with some other minor questions about HeroQuest and Advanced Heroquest]
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End of interview
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Links to many other relevant interviews about HeroQuest are compiled in this thread.
