Fantasy games & GW history specialist Jordan Sorcery has recently performed a great live interview with legend Bob Naismith in his secondary You Tube channel Jordan Sorcery Pods. Bob Naismith has been one of the main Games Workshop's historical sculptors of miniatures since the 80's and he was responsible of sculping many of the miniatures of HeroQuest and Space Crusade board games for Milton Bradley.
The full interview can be found in the Jordan Sorcery's channel here, however, I took the licence of transcripting here just the questions and answers related with those MB projects. Nevertheless, of course I encourage you to watch the full video since it is really interesting! If you detect any grammatical error in the transcription, please don't hesitate to tell me and I will correct it, remember that I am not a native English speaker.
Thanks to Jordan again for performing these great interviews with historical game creators.
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EXTRACT OF INTERVIEW WITH BOB NAISMITH by Jordan Sorcery, published in Mar 2025 at his secondary YouTube channel, @JordanSorceryPods
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[Jordan and Bob are talking about how was manufacturing plastic miniatures in Games Workshop back in the day...]
Jordan Sorcery (JS): Are there any memorable mistakes or disasters that you can think?
Bob Naismith (BN): There was one I remember we did in the first Blood Bowl set, I think. Something went wrong with the foot on the human player, because we only had one model, and I think because we left the pattern maker to solve the problem. They'd solved the problem, but what they have done... because the foot was twisted, they'd resculpted it in a way that made it look just like broken, basically. [Laughs] By which point the technology meant that the only thing we could do was to remove metal from the mold which would add plastic to the model, because you were working in the negative, so I had to go down and I had to amend the resin negatively to try to fix the foot. We kind of got there, if you looked at it in detail now you think "Oh yeah I can see it now." [Laughs] So there was there was the odd thing like that, but generally speaking they were not too bad. So many people were interested in looking at the models, they usually trapped most of the problems and although it was a bit of a nightmare, sometimes to fix them, by the time they went off to be made into patterns, they were pretty much what we wanted and pretty close to what we needed. We did all sort we had some great fun, we did the plastics. There was a team up with Milton Bradley, who were part of the Hasbro operation and we did Hero Quest, and that was quite good fun because we did it in the same way that we did the Space Marines, and as the Design Manager at the time, I said to the sculptors "Well, we need to make the Space Marines, who would like to make get involved?" And so Jes [Goodwin] put his hand up, and Aly Morrison put his hand up, and the [Perry] twins put their hands up, so we sat and it was it was like a little old ladies sewing bee, where you had like one big table, and all the models were in the middle, and so no one actually could say "I made that, I made that figure", because we all picked each thing up and worked on it, and we did it like that in the round, and we did that also with the Hero Quest stuff for the most part, there were some models that I made just because we needed them at the end, the Undead, the Skeletons, the Mummy I think, and some of the heroes, like the Barbarian figure, the twins did the Dwarf, I think Jes did most of the Elf, and Aly did the Fighter, or the Ranger, I can't remember... I think it was the Ranger. So that was great, but I remember working at that time... all the sculptors were in town, in Enfield Chambers, which is right in the middle of Nottingham, and I was based out at Eastwood, and I had there to help me, I had John Thornthwaite, and I had Dave Andrews! who's still there, bless him, and we were involved, and we had to make all the furniture pieces.... I don't know if you remember Hero Quest?
JS: Yeah, amazing pieces.
BN: So we would make the top for the wardrobe, or the top for the table, and then the vertical design was a piece of cardboard, that you just plugged in underneath that was printed, so we had to make all these bits on the top, and I remember we had to supply, and Hasbro said "Okay just send us two castings of everything." Well, that scared the pants off us because we were so used to making little models, and even if we made three ups they were probably about 90 mm tall, so they were quite small, and then we'd made these bits of furniture, and then they said we need them three ups, so we had to make them, and they were like about 15 inches [Laughs], and then we had to make a rubber mold of them, and I remember we got this we ordered a whole load of silicon, and we mixed it, and we poured it, and we waited for it to set, and it didn't set, I was "Oh no... because our masters were in the middle of all this gunk", so eventually I had to call it and we had to say "This rubber's just not working", so we had to clean it all off and poor Dave got the job of cleaning all this rubber off, and eventually we did it, we managed, but it was quite an expensive mistake as I recall, but yeah, that was part of the magic and the enjoyment I had at Workshop, it was like doing all this different stuff It was great.
JS: Yeah... and those just thinking of those Hero Quest models and then Space Crusade that came later of course with MB's incredible models, and just when you were putting those together, because some of the pieces for especially Space Crusade, but some of the Hero Quest expansions, were like push fit as well you'd get some weapons that would go in. Would that be handled by the pattern makers as well?
BN: No, we did a lot of that, yeah we did a lot of that ourselves. They would do the final engineering, but we would make allowances for them, so generally speaking what we would do is we'd make a peg fit unders sized, so it was loose, and then what then would happen is that the toolmaker could then at his discretion increase the size of the pin in order to make it fit, but the actual location and the design and the link up between say the guns and the model, that was at our end, we did that. There was one in Hero Quest... I think it was the Orcs, we only made one Orc, but they wanted to have different designs, so I remember we made the Orc, and I think it had no arm, but we designed several arms with several swords, so then what they could do is they could copy the body of the Orc into the steel, and then they would get the resin for the arm of Orc 1, and they would cut that in and join it all up, so that was done at the tool making stage rather than at the sculpting stage, so we were doing everything we could to maximize the output but with least effort, so that was a cost control thing because it worked, it was just a great way to work, so it was great fun.
[Jordan and Bob continue talking in an interesting conversation about Bob's love for science fiction, his contributions to Rogue Trader and the Alien film IP challenges they faced in the design of Space Hulk components, before starting to talk a bit about Space Crusade ...]
JS: Would that be just for models of a certain scale or...?
BN: It was intended to be part of the Space Hulk, so it was going to be used, I think... was it for us? or was it for Space Crusade? I don't think it was Space Crusade, because obviously we did a lot of work on Space Crusade. I did the Dreadnoughts, you know? the kind of walkers things for them as well, I did those and the guns, and it was just fantastic times because each project was maybe... I don't know, four to six weeks, and then you would finish that, and you go off and do something else, so it was really exciting stuff and... I don't know if the guys enjoy so much, now is that you could see a product through in its entirety, from concepts, from sorting out drawings, getting them approved, to the making, to the approval, to speaking to any of the engineers you needed to speak to if it was plastics, solving all of those issues. You could see it through yourself, whereas now I think because, as I said the system is so smooth, and so ordered, there are people who whose entire job it is to just speak to the engineers, or someone's job is to I don't know... for sculpting they've got like guys who are great at making skulls, or great at making swords, and they just make skulls and swords all day digitally, and then they give them over to someone else who uses them in the model, so it's a different experience now, I'm sure that there are core creatives in the middle of all this who are doing the initial generation of design, but they're probably very few and really quite special, I think.
[Jordan and Bob continue talking about many others interesting topics like modern 3D sculpting or Bob's contributions in Games Workshop in also making illustrations...]
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Links to many other relevant interviews about HeroQuest are compiled in this thread.
