A Fabled LEGO Brick History
April 7, 2021The LEGO Group’s decision to hand off the development of LEGO® Star Wars™: The Video Game to an outside group in the early 2000s was both difficult to make and not well-informed, said Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, who was the CEO of the LEGO Group at the time and is now the executive chairman of LEGO Brand Group.
“It was a very difficult decision,” he said. “And I think also a decision that unfortunately, was biased by having a management team – not least including myself and the board of directors – that actually knew relatively little about this massive market of video gaming.”
In retrospect, Knudstorp said, the LEGO Group should have probably struck a deal similar to the one made about LEGOLAND, which included the LEGO Group maintaining an ownership stake.
Instead, Giant Interactive maintained not just full ownership of the 2005 game, but – for a time – had full global rights to all LEGO video games.
Knudstorp said that ultimately the company learned a lot of important lessons through that deal.
“I think from the beginning we should have taken an equity stake to be able to co-invest and co-influence and be part of that journey, while recognizing that we might not be the best operators of that company.”
Importantly, he added, it wasn’t about the money, but rather the LEGO Group’s ability to better help shape the direction of the studio by being more directly involved.
“I think for all the brilliant things TT Games did, they did have some weaknesses like we all do,” he said. “And some of the weaknesses that emerged over time, of course, were that they did not as successfully shift from console gaming to mobile gaming, and perhaps also they were not so successful in establishing online games with a lot of players. And finally, their market reach was really mainly in the Western world. They didn’t really penetrate markets that were strategically important to us, including Japan, South Korea, and China.”
Knudstorp also noted that the fact that a number of LEGO Group employees had to leave the company and form Giant Interactive to make such a successful game, changed how he thought about the company as a whole at the time.
“It was kind of scary to think about some of the very key people behind the game, who were actually former LEGO Group staff, were liberated by being in a different context,” he said. “I learned so much from that.”
He said that realization deeply influenced his thinking about a wide range of things, including his relationship with the creative team behind LEGOLAND and working with the creators of The LEGO Movie.
“It was mind-blowing to me that it’s not about individual capability,” he said. “It’s about the culture and the system that that individual is a part of. And so, I think also, the huge success of the physical brick over the past almost 20 years now, is really bringing the innovation around the physical brick into the right culture that’s befitting to a physical product – which by the way, is totally different from the innovation, culture, and environment that’s required for digital play.”
The reflective moment was part of a deep conversation with Knudstorp on the Bits N’ Bricks podcast about the 25-year history of LEGO video games and digital play.
Knudstorp, who ran the company as its CEO from 2004 to 2016, also spoke about how the company was suffering from a glut of innovation and dysfunctional core empowered by a split identity when he started as CEO.
Over his tenure, the company first reduced its broad-ranging efforts in everything from clothing and watches, to amusement parks and video games and then doubled down on its core, he said. Once the LEGO Group recovered from its brush with bankruptcy in 2003, the company refocused its efforts on expansive innovation, but with a firmer handle on how those efforts traced back to the physical brick.
Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen also chatted with the podcast, reflecting on a life spent playing with and working for the LEGO Group. Kristiansen, whose grandfather founded the company, became the president and CEO of the LEGO Group in 1979. Under his leadership, the company introduced play themes, the minifigure, LEGO.com, LEGO MINDSTORMS®, and licensed properties.
Kristiansen reflected on how his meeting with famed mathematician, computer scientist, and professor of education Seymour Papert led to a deep and lasting partnership with the Media Lab at MIT. That, in turn, led to the creation of – among other things – LEGO MINDSTORMS.
It was his own love of programming, Kristiansen said, that guided his interest in all forms of technology.
“I love programming because I think it is so much similar to building with LEGO bricks,” he said. “You start programming because you have an idea about what something should be like or what you want to achieve. And you know that it can be done. It’s just a question of you finding the way. And that, to me, reminds me of LEGO play, where you really ought to sit there and imagine what you can build, and then you start building. You change it on the way, and you get the result and, normally, you are happy with the results.”
He said that the rise of the internet in the ‘90s also inspired in him a fascination with how fans of the LEGO brick could one day share their creations with one another online.
It was from those early ideas of creating a digital version of the LEGO brick that the company’s video games first sprung. And today, video games and the LEGO Group’s many other forms of digital play are an important part of the company’s efforts both now and over the next 25 years.
“It is very, very important,” he said. “We are, as a company, also very open to new developments. We see that in our product assortment, we see that also in the video games that are developed, and I think it really is inspiring to see what is happening in the digital world.”
This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.
Explore more…
In order of appearance
The LEGO Story — YouTube
The LEGO Story: Outtake — YouTube
LEGO Star Wars™: The Video Game — Wikipedia
LEGO Brand Group — New structure for active family ownership of the LEGO® brand
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp — Wikipedia
Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen — Wikipedia
LEGOLAND — Official website
SPU Darwin — Inside the LEGO Group’s Secretive Strategic Product Unit Darwin
LEGO Island — LEGO Island: Birth of a LEGO Video Game
History of LEGO Video Games — Official website
TT Games — How Harry Potter and an amazing demo led to LEGO Star Wars™: The Video Game
Seymour Papert — Wikipedia
Seymour Papert on Talking Turtles — YouTube
Minecraft — Official website
Roblox — Official website
Fortnite — Official website
LEGO Unity Microgames — Rise of the LEGO Digital Creator
