Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally published on December twenty seventh, twenty twenty two. And Robert, is an interview you did with Ian Livingstone. Livingstone Livingstone Livingstone.
Yes, yeah, this was a fun one that I did last year. I think they're in like the holiday seasons when you know, some folks were out and trying to line up some chats and yeah, this is one of the creators of Games Workshop, and he has his hands and his mind and so many other games and just like game systems in general. So this was a really fun chat and I'm excited to share it with everyone again.
Let's jump right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and today I'd like to present an interview I recorded earlier this month with Sir Ian Livingstone, co founder of Games Workshop and co author of the
Fighting Fantasy game book series. Now, the creations to come out of Games Workshop, especially have meant so much to me over the years, and it was a real honor to chat with him about the early days of Games Workshop, about old school gaming in general, the meaning of games, and of course his new book, Dice Men, The Origin Story of Games Workshop, which he wrote with Steve Jackson. The book is out now digitally in the physical version is either out or available for pre order, depending on
what region you're in. Either way you get it, pick it up. It's a great read. It has so many wonderful images in it. It will really transport you back in time. It tells a great tale. So, without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. Hi, Ian, thanks for joining us.
It's great to speak to you today.
So the book is Dice Mean The Origin Story of Games Workshop, written with Steve Jackson, and I think at this point a great number of our listeners out there are certainly well acquainted with the name Games Workshop. Even if you didn't grow up with the games and the miniatures like I did, and like many many others did, you're still going to probably be aware of all the novels, the video games, the animated series and so much more.
It's big business. But I thought you might take us back and just in brief remind us what Games Workshop was back in the day when you and Steve Jackson co founded it.
Well, Steve and I were old school friends and we met up in London in the seventies and our passion was playing board games, mainly those that came from the US, games like Diplomacy and Avalon Hill Games. And we thought, wouldn't it be great we could somehow turn our passion
of playing games into some sort of fledgling business. So we decided to publish a small fan called Out and Weasel, and we sent one copy to everybody wenew in Games, and although we hadn't sent it to him directly, one found its way to the desk of Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and Gary wrote to us and said, love your little fanzine. His this game I've just published
and designed. What do you think? And that game was Dungeons and Dragons, And whilst it didn't look much pretty playing box with a very ordinary illustration on the cover, it opened up your imagination like no game had ever done before, and I don't think any game ever will again, in that it allowed a new form of interactive entertainment.
Role playing people playing.
As heroes and wizards, exploring the labyrinth designed by games Master, and through theater on the fly, conversing in craziness. Incredible narrative story between the players as they forged their way through the dungeons, killing monsters and finding treasure. So we ordered six copies of D and D because that's all
the money we actually had in our lives. And on the back of that order, Gary gave us a three year exclusive distribution agreement for the whole of Europe, so we were effectively all playing is role playing people about a role playing game. It was very amateursh but that's how things started in the seventies.
Yeah, it was fascinating to read your take on the gaming world prior to the creation of games Workshop and prior to the introduction and creation of both Dungeons and Dragons, just how niche was gaming beyond family staples like Monopoly. During the nineteen sixties, for example.
Well, in the UK there was one company Dominator that was Waddington's and they published Monopoly include which is Clue in the US, Buccaneer and Formula one. And these games were enjoyable enough, but they were never satisfied gamers like Steve and myself. We wanted something more where there's more strategy than luck, and where you could do a negotiation and have a kind of a metal level of enjoyment
by all the bargaining and reneging on deals that could happen. Obviously, Diplomas is perfect for that kind of play where you can backstand people at will in order to dominate the world.
So those are the games we looked out for.
But D and D really changed our minds of the type of game we want to play. We suddenly immersed in this incredible fancy world and a kind of tolkienesque world of monster magic going on, these fantastic jos of mind through conversation, and it was that theater of the Fly that I just mentioned that became a place where we wanted to visit all the time.
Are you saying that it also Dungeons and Dragons sort of opened up the space for fantasy itself to be part of gaming because you describe a lot of the gaming prior to that is very like historical military based, right.
Yeah.
The miniatures companies in the UK in particular were all based on napoleonics, ancients and some World War two, but there was no fancy element as such, even though fancy was pretty well established in UK mythology from George and the Dragon or a Thurian Knights, and of course the books from Tolkien and others. So I guess there was no surprise that fancy gaming would ultimately come along as a viable genre to enjoy play.
Yeah, you described that, even Dungeons and Dragons kind of arises out of Chainmail, this military battle game that Gary Gygax said co created.
Right, Yeah, but he had this fancy supplement and when he played Dave Arnison's Blackmore, there was that fusion of the two coming together to create you know, this this male stone in gaming history that is Dungeons Dragons. But it was largely down I think to Gary's making it happen that it was as successful as it was. Clearly Dave answered kind of probably the original role playing concept in a fancy world as a result of its previous
gaming experiences, But it's Gary who made it happen. He took what was largely in Dave Anson's head and turned into fifty page rule book and then began the commercialization of that. So he was the driving force behind it.
So you mentioned earlier, you know, you had like the family games and then you mentioned like the Avalon Hill games that were coming down. Now was there was there just kind of like a big gap in complexity between say, the Avalon Hill games and the family games. Was there not much in between?
There wasn't really.
It was kind of full on hobby game as hex grid long and sometimes difficult to understand rules, which were the war games and particularly SPI war.
Games and most of the Avalon Hill games.
And then there was kind of on the other side of the fence that's almost too easy to play. So
we we wanted some more thing in the middle. And whilst that was something that we sold through playing Dungeon Dragons, we also as Games Workshops, started publishing our own board games to fill out what we thought was a viable gap, what kind of mid mid core gaming experiences, games like Talisman, Judge, Dread, Battle Cars, Apocalypse and others that we published under Workshops brand, as well as publishing Dungeon Dragons.
Yeah, I remember as a child before I became exposed to many of these other games, before being exposed to Dungeons and Dragons and Games Workshop games, we had family games in the household. My father had some of those SPI games, and I remember wanting to understand them and play them, but as a child that was completely overwhelmed by everything I found in the box.
Well, not only were the rule books completely lengthy and that you need to be kind of a Philadelphia lawyer to understand them, just setting up the counters would take hours as well, and I left any time for actually playing. I mean, some games like nineteen fourteen would last for days if you fee allowed it too, so it was almost like work rather than play sometimes.
And now on the subject of miniatures and miniature war games, until very recently, I really didn't know how much how far back it went. I think I saw in this is tremendously ill, but I saw some wonderful footage of the late actor Peter Cushing painting miniature soldiers and plotting out battles with historical bas Napoleonic yeah figures, this is pretty much what it consisted of. Prior to your work.
Well over one hundred years ago, there was lead miniatures put out there, a kind of fifty four millimeter scale or the twenty five millimeters that we did through typical wargaming and fantasy gaming miniatures of our time, but there were many historical figures that people collected and sometimes four battles. I mean, if you go back to Edwardian times, those there were many companies actually put producing lead figures which were painted, and so I think toy soldiers is nothing new.
It's just that toy soldiers that we made at Citadel Miniatures were fantasy figures rather than historical wargame figures.
Can you describe a little bit how Citadel Miniatures came together as part of or auxiliary to games workshop.
Yes, well, we'd been running workshops since nineteen seventy five. We decided to up our game in terms of publishing, so we dropped al and weaseled our little fanzine and started publishing White Dwarf Magazine, and we started running conventions Games Day. It's one of those conventions that Brian Ansell, who was running a company called as Guard Minutes of
the time, we met him briefly. There also ordering quite a lot of giant rats and other figures from him that could be used in d games, and he requested a meeting with us, and so we met him in seventy eight and he said that, you know, I can
be the answer to your miniatures problem. Because at that time we were importing most of our games from the US, from Ralph Parth in particular and Archive miniatures, and they were obviously very expensive to import, with not just a shipping cost but the import duty costs, and then the delivery times were also sort of the logistics of the supply chain was a bit challenging. So we agreed that we set up a company with him, and we call
that company citid Our Miniatures. But it was based where he lived in the Midlands, around around Nottingham, and that's how Ciciel came to be and it became just an amazing additive to the Games Workshop REMIT, which had historically just been publishing board games and opening retail shops.
And if things keep moving with the miniatures, how does it how does it grow in terms of the miniature's role in the games, Because I mean nowadays with Games Workshop, at least for me, like I think about the games and the minis and it's like it's very hard to
differentiate between the two. But it sounds like from what are read in the book, like at times that is kind of a struggle to decide even in the early days of Games Workshop, like what is what is the area that should be receiving the most attention, the miniatures or the games, Like what is the interaction between these two areas well?
Steve and I were running the games division effectively, so we wanted to put more resource into publishing board games, publishing more role playing games, opening more shops, publishing more magazines as well as white dwarf. So it's all around
the kind of print media and retal division. Whereas Brian Anser was running miniatures, wanted more resources allocated to more miniatures, and he had a great point because that the gross margin in miniatures was quite high, and he also argued that there should be a set of rules that enabled more minutes to be sold, because if you're making miniatures for role playing game, you tend to sell them in single units because you only need one beholder or one skeleton,
or one cleric or one fighter. So really that's how the Warhammer concept came about, as a way to sell units of miniatures rather than single figures. At the same time in ninety at the end of nineteen seventy eight,
and we lost the exclusivity with Dungeon Dragons. Now, Gary gig As I said earlier, had given us a three year exclusive distribution agreement which ended the end of seventy eight in the beginning, then in seventy nine he came to business and said that he wanted to merge his company TSR with our company Games Workshop, and we would be given like kind a third of the by identity.
But Steve and I were kind of independently minded young Brits at the time and we didn't want to have a split life between London and Wisconsin, so we said no to that merger opportunity. So whilst remind the biggest distributors of Dungeons and Dragons and TSR Hobbies Games, we're no longer the exclusive distributor, and it was only a matter of time before they had set up in the UK and have their own distribution points and we might obviously be.
That would obviously impact on our celves.
So we know, we knew we needed something that was going to be our own intellectual property. We determined our own destiny in our future. But it had to something that could resonate with a wide audience and be able to scale. So as we had some considerable success with some of the board games that we published, another role playing games that we published on the license, like Traveler and ruin Quest, and important games like Call of a Cuthulhu.
It wasn't really until Warhammer came about that we were suddenly in in a much better place in terms of being able to be independent. And it was an original idea from Bright Ansel to publish a kind of free set of rules as a as a giveaway with the mail orders. But then he brought in Rick Priestley and Richard Halliwell to kind of beef up the rules, and when they were played, he decided, well, rather than just give them away, let's make this into a product itself.
And that's how Warhammer, the original Fancy Battle game came out in nineteen eighty three, and even though it was loaded with errors and mistakes and wasn't particularly complete, it sold out very quickly. Some three thousand copies went pretty much immediately. So that's how the second edition of Warhammer came about. And then they realized that, you know what, if this is our own ip, we should focus more
on it rather than other people's products. And therefore Warhammer was really was They became front and central focus for the whole of the company.
So all the rules enabled more minutes to be sold. White Dwarf then focused.
On on on on Warhammer the retail stores. There something less of imported products and more of our own products, and that's that slow move over happened over quite a few months before it became a totally Warhammer focused company.
Now in the book, you describe the first space marine minis that come about, and there are some lovely photographs as well. I have to stress for anyone out there who's interested in the book, there are so many wonderful photographs and scans as well of some of these uh uh, these early magazine publications and you know, early editions of White Dwarf. It's it's fact, it's like a scrapbook.
Well, I like to think it as as a personal memoile where there as much historical, photographic and image reference as possible. And it's say it's more of a a biography, personal biography warts and all and full of anecdotes, or on a business, a book about business.
And that's why there are over four.
Hundred photographs in the book, some which of which I mean a lot of which had never been seen before, you.
Know, rummaging around in the roof.
In the in the left looking for a old thirty five millimeters transparencies slides that we had to have scan and getting really excited finding looking at slides you hadn't seen for some you know, forty five years. It's just as an amazing experience in itself. And then writing more and more, and then talking to more colleagues to validate what we've said, and remembering all this weird stuff that happened, like having to live in a van for three months
because he couldn't get any bank finance. You're going to see the bank manager telling about dungeon and dragons. It looks like you're like, you're mad and nice you to leave. So we had to finance everything out of out of cash flow, and it'd only afford her into a very small office at the back of the state agent, and had to live in Steve's van throughout three months of an awful winter. But you know, I think I said it the books. You could call it living the gym,
but clearly it wasn't. But when you're driven by passion around your own hobby, it doesn't seem like hardship.
The van in question, is this is Van Morrison? Correct?
That was the nickname, the one only Van Morrison. Yes, a big blue van that was our home for three months.
Yeah. The personal stories are so such a wonderful aspect of the book. Again, all these photographs of the real people involved in these games and in games workshop, but it really beefs up the personal story. And then you have these little so many of these anecdotes and sort of little adventures that pop up along the way.
Yeah, like going too the States to see let's see Carrie in nineteen seventy six to in theory a ten gen Con nine, but taking that two months to get there, and delivering cars from New York to LA, then another one from LA to San Francisco and then on from to Chicago, and all the adventures had along the route.
It was a year of the It was the Olympics year and McDonald's are running this promotion where if the US want to a gold medal, you want to I think it was a big mac and then if they want to selve medal, you get a large fries and a bronze you get a coke.
And so we were being kind of pretty.
Chatted by wanting the US to win all these all these all these medals, because if you had a ticket that matched the winning winning sport, you'd win one of the items.
So that kept us alive on the road.
And this is was this off the trip where you went through Vegas?
Yes, that's right.
Yeah, yeah, that part was very interesting as well, in part because you're describing like taking a jount through the casinos there and in a way kind of witnessing gaming or at its worst, you know, at it's kind of like crushing worst whilst you and your cohorts are kind of on this like mission of and you know, and you've been describing like just being so inspired by these new ideas and then these two game possibilities they're emerging.
Yeah, it was. It was.
I mean, I think that Vegas and if you go there for a few days, but to see people isn't their money. One particular gentleman from Japan, it was a bit sad to see his one hundred dollar bills disappear so quickly that we didn't dare gamble a penny because we just couldn't afford it.
So how long did this did this process of going back and sort of piecing together the story of the early games workshops days, you know, trying to find these various photographs, Like how long did it take to put all this together?
Well?
I thought it was going to take about six months, and I think it took nearly four years. Because it wasn't just the process of doing it I was.
It was also.
It was doing it in times when I was free, because even though I'm nearly seventy three years old, I'm still very much looking full time on various projects, still writing firey fantasy game books and game books in which you are the hero of the branching narrative with the game system attached.
It's the fortieth.
Anniversary of this year and I wrote a new book to celebrate that, Shadows of the Giants, which was great to go back to my roots in that respect. And I'm also I also have my own school in Bournemouth which is all around digital creativity and good arts education using game based learning and very much influenced by Dungeon
Dragons the power of players it were. And as I mentioned, I'm also a general partner Hero Capital, which is a venture capital fund investing in video games, studios and technologies.
So it's a question of finding the time.
And then the more I spent researching and writing, the more I wanted it to be as good it could possibly be, And so I went the extra mile, so to speak to to try and tell the full story and make sure what I said was validated by cross referencing in magazines and talking to the people were who
were around at the time. Sadly some of those people have since passed away, but nevertheless, I think it's a it's a pretty accurate account of those origin years of origin story years of seventy five to eighty five.
Yeah, and I have to stress to everyone out there, you don't have to be like a game designer or just to be like a really hardcore gaming fan to find the story engaging. You know, it's it's ultimately the story of people and their passions.
Yes, I says, I'd like to see almost like a coffee table book where you can just casually look at the images of the time, the fashions and the things we did in the seventies and early eighties, but also, if you're curious, you know, read some of the story behind what became an incredible company. Now were some three billion dollars on the London Stock Exchange and also perhaps be amused by some of the anecdotes told in the story.
Now, you mentioned the Fighting Fantasy game books series, and
I definitely wanted to ask you about about that. I actually I picked up I picked up The Warlock of Firetop Mountain prior to this interview, and I was playing through it with my son a bit and tremendous fun, encountering all you know, encounting crocodiles and buranas and goblins and so forth, and very very captivating for both of us, and I think he was getting he was almost getting a little too into it, concerned about the danger we were encountering.
He's ten.
But this this idea of the game book, Like how does it?
Like?
What is that? What is the world of game books? Prior to your work with game books? And then like, how like what is the process like of laying these out and and and creating one that works? Because I definitely remember as a younger person picking up a game book by someone else. It was another company, a competitor I met, and it was heartbreaking when it broke, like it reached a point where I could not go any further because there was some sort of number error in the publication right well.
I believe Fighting Fancy was the very first game book series which had a branch and narrative and the game system attached to it around about the same time, although we hadn't seen them.
On this side of the Atlantic.
The Chooser and Adventure books were out, but they were more choose your own paragraph. There was no game element to making. So what we tried to do with Fighting Fancy was distill a role playing experience into a single player solo adventure whereby the book replace the games master and you, the reader, moved from a passive reading experience into an interactive experience by baking choices. So it's that
empowerment because you are the hero at the end. There were four hundred paragraph At the end of each one, you have to make a choice. Simplistically, you turn left or right, and then there are puzzles to solve. There are monsters to fight. That's when you use the dice. There are three basic characteristics skipdamina, and luck, which are
modified through your progress through the adventure. Your skill might go up if you find a magic potion, or your stamina might go down if you lose a fight in combat with a monster and then you test your luck to escape or try and get extra extra benefits by rolling dice against your luck roll. So we wanted to have a very thrilling experience with people that given the
agency through choices empowering and they were hugely successful. They went on to sell over twenty million copies globally and they got a whole generation of children reading in the eighties because of the agency. That empowerment was very compelling.
And this read by word of mouth. Clearly there was no Internet at the time, but it was the word of mouth, which is the best kind of variety you could possibly hope for in the playgrounds of the schools, initially in the UK and then it spread into Europe and ultimately globally, and so Walkfi Top Mountain as you read was the first one. And we wanted to use our own artists that we'd use at Games Workshop because we found those really stimulated children's imagination because they were
realistically detailed where it's puffing. Were a bit nervous about it that the imprint because as they were children's books, they wanted to write nice safe covers with a little toadstool, little gnomes sitting on the toe, all of them, butterflies in the air whilse. We really wanted the kids to be kind of go, oh, my goodness, what is that horrendous creature coming at me.
It's going to buy my head off. So we wanted that.
Kind of thrill of excitement and then the joy of them, you know, succeeding by getting.
Through the through the through the books.
So finally a key in one room allow used to open a chest or door further on in the adventure, but right to them, as you say, was an absolute nightmare. It was like writing multiple storylines at once and having to bring the readers back to certain common points, no points where they had to have essential information to allow them to progress. You had to balance the economy so
there wasn't too much gold or too little gold. You had to make sure it wasn't too difficult or too easy, so it was a fun experience but with enough enough of challenge but not impossible. Make sure there were no culder sacks and all the choice you make. So he designed them on a flow chart really is like a computer computer flow chart, making sure every every split in the in the in the adventure was notated and what could be found or not found at each decision point.
But the important thing is that every decision had to have a consequence, otherwise why have bit branching anyway, So it was really good fun, and of course my joy was to lure people to their doom, promise them wealth and glory with nice rose petals along the pathway, only for them to fall on poison spikes down a pit, which was always good fun for me, but of course
most people cheated. It had their multiple pages in the in the book, and you could see them on public transport on buses and trains where their fingers about five places in the books. It always used to make me laugh when I see that. I used to see that in those days.
I love the innovation of it. You mentioned the dice that are used a couple of d six, but I love the innovation of the dice at various dice combinations at the bottom of each page that you can flip through. You don't have physical dice and do a dice roll.
That was a more recent adaptation innovation in the original books, which were a much more highly detailed in their illustrations and perhaps more threatening, it didn't have the distroll.
So yeah, I guess that's.
It would have made it easier for playing it on the train. I guess now you mentioned computer games. The games like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and these other game books you worked on, these have eventually find their way into the world of computer gaming, right they did.
I mean, Iceman doesn't really cover too much about video games except for what we did at the time in the early eighties selling Activision games and very early PCs and console gaming, just when there was an early crash in the early eighties which had quite a negative impact on Games Workshop for the amount of stock we had
a retail. But more recently the five Defense of Game books have been available digitally from from from tim Man Games in Australia designed them as apps and Nomad Games have created on games on Switch and also on PC.
It's more of a top down.
Kind of not a collectible car game, but being rewarded with cards when you progress through the adventure and ultimately get through so depth. Chup Dungeon, City of Thieves, the Forest of Doing of all be important to digital formats, so there's something for everyone these days.
Books or video games.
One thing I was wondering about as well is that. You know, obviously we have this, you know, the rich world of miniature based games and dungeons and ng dragons, various role playing games, and these these game books as well, and in the background or in the forefront, depinding you look at it, I guess we have the emergence of of even more video game opportunities. And today we have
some pretty amazing video games out there. The graphics are better than ever before, the game systems involved are so complicated. But we as gamers, gamers of all ages, we keep coming back to to that, like we're coming back to these game books. We're coming back to physical tabletop games and to games that take place predominant in our imagination. What does that mean you think?
I think one is at the expense of the other. I think it's nice to have. Do you know I play both board games. I'm sitting in a room here you might see with over fifteen hundred board games in the room, but I also have, you know, hundreds of video games. I think it's it depends how you feel on the day. And you can also see that it's that, you know, Vinyl's made a revival as people don't just want to stream music to whatever digital advice they have,
they like to have the physicality. Physical books have made a revival because people like to surround themselves with things that give them pleasure. The physical as well as the digital. I think helps satisfy all parts of the human mind, rather than one at the expense of the other. House so I enjoy both. It depends on who I'm going to play with or what I'm going to read, and in what form I happened to be using at the time.
If I'm traveling, obviously it's going to be digital. If I'm at home, probably physical.
Now I'm going to Coneck to something I was going to ask earlier and we end up going in a different direction. But you describe the first space Marine minis in the book, and there's some lovely photographs of the little minis as well. The space Marines of warm Er forty thousand have certainly become very iconic. They're very recognizable, part of the of the of the brand in clearly big business as well. How did this concept originally come together?
Well, they've changed an awful lot of time, the Space Marines of the eighties to the Space Marines of today.
They've just got bigger.
Bolder and stronger and have got an incredible esthetic around them now of course, and everyone everyone loves them.
They came from very hubble beginnings.
I think Bob Nasmith came up with the original space bringing look and feel in his iconic first miniature. So I call things small like acorns. They become oaks over time, have given the rights environment for growth through their popularity. So it's great to see them so amazing successful today. And there's the power of Warhammer Porty k is extraordinary. I think there's some talking to about video games. I think there's some fifty licenses now and some extraordinary games
being put out there. So the world of Warhammer is rich and famous and widespread now.
Obviously there's a there's a lot to say about about game design and approaches to game design and in the business of game design and the business of gaming. Do you have any quick advice to throw out there to anyone who is a budding game designer or thinks they want to get into the industry of game design.
Well, I guess it depends on what part of the industry you want to get into. Is it tabletop war gaming, is it board games, is it video games?
The thing that unites them more.
When people ask me what's the most the three most important things about a game, I will say gameplay, gameplay, gameplay. In video games, whilst technology and graphics are essential, they play a supporting role. It always comes down to how you're enjoying the game to play, rather than what things
look like. But in a board game, of course, great production values has really enhanced that experience now with all the bits, and the graphics are amazing now, but the gameplay is what makes us want to start playing in the first place. So games should be quick to learn but difficult to master, so you can get various degrees of expert abilities in these games. The better play you are, you should be more successful in winning. And of course
you need an exciting theme that resonates with everybody. I mean, in board games, it's no surprise that Ticket to Ride has been successful. You could learn it very quickly, but it takes a long time to become a master of it. Really, all the strategies, it looks great, The trains resonate with everybody. The pieces are lovely because you pick up these little
train carriers and plot them around the board. So it's kind of got all the component parts of a classically successful game, and similarly with video games, there the appeal has to be in the gameplay and then the meta level of course that's common denominate about all these is
the enjoyment caused by people playing together. So it's that joy by anything that is a shared experience is always enhanced, and there's always an enhanced experience, whether it's looking at a sunset or having dinner or going to the cinema with somebody, and obviously with games, you're playing.
With somebody that that's that's.
That's that fun that's created by just the conversation, whether it's the shared experience of enjoyment or doing a deal and renegey on it. That's as that extra level of enjoyment. So there's a there are many things to consider when designing a game, but there's kind of there's there's four basic principles.
I think he's absolutely vital to include.
Now you mentioned earlier all the all the activities that you're involved in. You and of course you're a legend in the game design industry. Do you do you still gather with friends and just play games purely recreationally.
We play once a week with the same group of people since the eighties, so still Steve Jackson plus Peter Molnu from the video games industry, one of the UK's premiere designers. I mean he created Populos originally, and Fable and Black and White and other amazing video games titles. And it's kind of a tongue in cheek Gentleman's club in that we play games and keep a record all the games played every every week and score points, and I send out a newsletter the games. That newsletter largely
just to criticize the other people playing. It allows me as secretary to treat it as my own kind of give them verbal abuse the whole time. At the end of the year, we have a cup, the cup that's presented to the champion. So we don't take ourselves seriously about doing it, but it adds another dimension to play in the games that we do. So you've been doing it for say, since the eighties. I've published six hundred and twenty seven issues of the Game that Newsletter to a circulation to six people.
So coming back to the book for a second again. The book is Dice Men, The Origin Story of Games Workshop. We talked a little bit about how it came together. But why did it come together? Why now?
Two?
Well, I started writing it about four years ago, largely because Games Workshop was doing so well as a company. Everyone was saying, what is this games company on the London Stock Exchange that's now worth three or four billion dollars?
That's ridiculous.
How can it be worth more than some of the major corporations I've known all my life? Where did it come from? And when I meet people, I said, you know, what was your first how do you get into into games? And so I started coming calls Games Workshop and they said, well how did that come about? So I thought, you know what it really is about time this was put down in writing as a kind of a personal memoir and something that could be there for posterity long after
I've gone and Steve's gone. It would be there for people who might be remotely interested in what has been an incredible journey, the kind of birth of the game industry in the UK and globally. Really it was such an amateur thing in the in the in the seventies. But to see that down on paper and won't be lost forever, I thought it was important thing to do. So here we are life is a game for us.
Well, it's a it's a it's a great read. I highly recommend it to our listeners. And I want to thank you for coming on the show. And I also want to just thank you for you know, helping to bring about all these great creations that mean so much to us. I mean the Warhammer, Warhammer forty thousand, uh like, these are these are things that still bring me a lot of joy today as an adult, and certainly gave me a lot of joy when I first discovered them as a kid.
Thank you. That's very kind of you said that.
I mean, for me as a games player, to being able to working games for forty seven years being absolute privilege and a joy.
So thank you, Thank you.
Thanks once more to sir Ian for taking time out of his day to chat with me here. It was a real pleasure.
Again.
The book is Dice Men, the Origin Story of Games Workshop, written with Steve Jackson. You can find that wherever you get your books. I highly recommend checking it out and picking it up. Just a reminder that core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind published on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a listener mail episode on Mondays. A short form Monster Factor Artifact episode on Wednesdays and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a
weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you have any questions that you would like to ask, any information you'd like to share. Do you have particular memories of any of these games workshop creations that you would like to bring up, or if you have experience with the Fighting Fantasy game books series. I know these were near and dear to a lot of folks growing up, write in. We would love to hear from you and potentially read
those messages on a future episode of Listener Mail. Thanks as always to Max and JJ for producing, editing, and splicing everything together here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind and Yeah, if you want to reach out to us, you can email us at contact and Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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