Back in the day, when I was a wee small lad, My mum worked for a big luxury goods store within the toy section. She was invited onto a trip to a national toy trade show where a company was pushing their brand new game on her and her fellow colleagues. The new game, was in fact, HeroQuest (1989). My mum, knowing that I liked my board games bought the game for me as a present.
This was great, it had lots of plastic miniature figures and 3D scenery and the board would change depending on the scenario you were playing and you could make your own stories up. And it was awesome… that’s if someone would play it with me…
I still have my copy to this day and it has most of the parts too. But I can’t envisage myself digging it out, to play with my kids. Mainly because there are much better games to play.
However, a post popped up on Facebook this week, which nearly made me spit my coffee all over the office monitor.
It was KingGloriousSquirrel that has come up with the idea to bring out a LEGO version of this old classic. But it is only an idea and needs many like-minded fellow gamers or lego enthusiasts to help it reach its goal. The LEGO IDEAS web site is where someone has pitched an idea to bring a dream project to life, in LEGO form and this is where you can find the dungeon crawler and the hopes of many to come it back from the grave for a new generation to enjoy. But first, you would have to build it before then playing it.
ideas.lego.com is a crowdsourcing platform similar to Kickstarter but instead of people giving their hard earn money to a complete stranger, who wants to make their dream product come true. IDEAs is run by LEGO and anyone can pop along and create a project that uses LEGO bricks, then they just need to get votes from the public in a certain time frame. When 100, 1000 and 5000 votes are reached then extra time is added to the project, all in the hope of reaching 10,000 supporting votes. To which the project could be considered to be made by LEGO and released to the shops.
This could be a great idea and a way to bring Heroquest back the shops, but here where the problem lies, who owns the copyrights I hear three companies own parts of the IPs. And would the plastic brick company want to deal with that sort of hassle? However, they don’t need to get the rights in many ways, because a lot of the game is generic fantasy tropes, the however board could be a problem. They could use their own IPs.
The creator of the project is bouncing ideas around that the minifigures, could be customisable, letting the players clip weapons and armour to the figures as they play and collected items. And then there is always public content creation.
why not pop on over and take a look yourself, take another 5 minutes to sign up and support this IDEA. let see what happens if this does get 10,000 votes, it might just pop up in a toy store near you. This would be the one and only way that I’ll be (might) able to play this again with my children.
Joel