Game changer
Heroquest
I don’t feel nostalgia for many things, but when I fire up HeroQuest and the music suddenly flips into Golden Brown (imagine being a composer, told you only have 30 kilobytes for your entire musical score and thinking, “Cool, that means I can fit this harpsichord solo by The Stranglers in”), I feel a full-blown Proustian rush.
The ad for the board game version of HeroQuest has the same effect. Like a whole generation of baby dorks I saw those kids saying “I’ll use my broadsword” and “Fire of Wrath!” and immediately asked my parents to buy it for me when Christmas rolled around. Then I played it with my parents, my friends and my babysitter until everyone was thoroughly bored. Even my babysitter didn’t want to play it any more, and she was paid to spend time with me. I kept playing by myself, keeping the board set up on a tiny table for one under the stairs, controlling all the monsters as well as a full suite of four heroes. Now that I think about it this is actually quite a depressing memory.
Table talk
What was great about the board game was that it came with such an excellent set of dungeon furniture and miniatures. That manic, grinning goblin is still the first thing I think of when goblins show up as level-one enemies in any game. The one-eyed fimir, right out of Warhammer, looked like a Ray Harryhausen monster. I still have a bunch of the plastic skeletons and mummies, which later became the core of an undead team in tabletop fantasy sports game Blood Bowl. The cards were lovely too, with their dopey, overconfident adventurers who’ve just cast Rock Skin or swigged a potion of strength.
Once you sat down to play it the game was really nothing special. Sometimes you’d roll to move and have one of those turns where you can’t get anywhere and just have to say, “I search for secret doors and traps,” and the Evil Wizard player would look at the map and say, “There are no secret doors or traps here.” (HeroQuest was one of those games where, as the kid who owned it and knew the rules, you’d have to be the bad guy and never get to actually play one of those rad heroes on the cover.) Some of the
“HeroQuest was one of those games where, as the kid who owned it and knew the rules, you’d have to be the bad guy and never get to actually play one of those rad heroes on the cover.”
quests were a bit rubbish too, like the one where every door randomly teleported you to a different room. Honestly, to hell with that.
Gremlin Interactive’s 1991 videogame version keeps all of the worst things about HeroQuest and adds a few more. It has fewer equipment cards, so your wizard can’t buy a cloak of protection, and the AI is so daft it won’t even follow you to another screen.
Those screens are tiny, only depicting one room or hallway – sometimes just a dinky three squares of dungeon. If one of the other heroes is standing on the edge of a transition between screens, finding the spot to click so you can move past them is a huge hassle. There are a lot of traffic jams.
The characters look ridiculous too, the barbarian a muscular toddler who waddles about like his diapers are full. The Amiga version was animated better but had fewer colours to work with, everything sprayed lurid purple like a psychedelic grape juice explosion. And that music I like so much? You can only have it or the sound effects on, not both at once.
Every quest ends the same way, with a march across the map to get to the stairs and out. All the monsters are dead, all the rooms have been searched, but Johnny Barbarian Hero here wandered off to explore the far corner of the map and now has to spend several minutes rolling-and-moving his way to the exit. The wanker.
I had forgotten about this until now, but back when I was playing the board game with my friends I’d let them finish the quest and collect their rewards without having to walk all the way back to the exit because that’s boring. I took that spirit of ignoring the rules when they got in the way of the fun with me when I started running RPGs like Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play for that same group of friends. So thanks for