Alligators, Buckaroo Banzai, and LEGO Backlot

November 17, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

The LEGO Studios theme set kicked off with a bang – and a camera you could use to record it.

The theme launched in 2000 with the release of the LEGO & Steven Spielberg MovieMaker Set and a little help from a game found on the LEGO website.

LEGO Studios Backlot was designed by the developers at Templar Games in the hopes of helping to promote the movie-making theme sets.

Templar had a recent history working with the LEGO Group on previous titles for the website, including the surprisingly successful Mata Nui Online Game, based on the BIONICLE® theme.

“Due to the success of BIONICLE, at that point, at least in terms of hits or clicks or eyeballs or whatever, they came to us to do this,” said studio founder Peter Mack. “We were just creating the look and feel and romance and excitement of a Hollywood studio environment for players to explore.”

The game’s story had players controlling a minifig who visits a movie lot in hopes of landing a job as a director. Players must work their way up the ladder by doing several jobs during the making of the movie Johnny Thunder Versus the World Crime League.

Despite being a video game that was played on a website, the 2002 title was in 3D and even offered a bit of an open world for players to explore. As a small team of creatives with backgrounds in filmmaking, everyone working on the game loved the concept for the theme set it was designed to market.

Work on LEGO Studios Backlot took about six to eight months, a relatively short amount of time for the traditional, on-disc games of the day, but not unusual for a web-based game.

Mack said the game evolved over time and that the process for making the game involved creating a pitch document and then growing it and adding things like mood boards.

“It was the early days of online video games, so a lot of stuff was pretty fast and loose, and everyone was learning as they go,” he said. “And everyone knew that they were doing something that hadn’t been done before. So, it was really developed and produced with the care and attention and organization that we could best bring to it as any software product.”

Ultimately, the game experience was boiled down to three levels, a much shorter experience than a game like Mata Nui Online Game. While the experience was relatively short, it made up for that with a surprising amount of fidelity built into a game that ran in a browser.

The first job in the game was for the player to find some things that the star of the movie, Johnny Thunder, lost around the backlot. Do that, and the player becomes a member of the crew who helps with production by doing things like retrieving a radio, waking up some sleeping crew, and fetching coffee.

Finally, the player has to do some stunts – including, infamously, crossing a tank of alligators, and cheering up a sad actor.

LEGO Studios Backlot also has some fun little Easter eggs, including Takua from BIONICLE hanging out in the coffee shop.

Because the entire game revolved around a fictional movie being created on the set, Mack decided to write an actual script for the movie: Johnny Thunder Versus the World Crime League.

Mack said the title is a reference to movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. That Peter Weller and Jeff Goldblum flick ends with the promise of a never-made sequel called Buckaroo Banzai Versus the World Crime League.

Despite being a free game built into a website in the early 2000s, despite only having three levels, and – by today’s standards – not a whole lot of visual panache, LEGO Studios: Backlot remains a fan favorite to this day.

Justin Lutcher, who was Templar Studios’ entire music and sound department at the time, points out that the release of LEGO Studios Backlot happened in the relative early days of the internet. And he thinks that is why so many people remember the game so fondly.

A lot of the feedback that I’ve heard from people who played the early online LEGO games is that it was a really exciting time,” he said. “Like, they would just wait for the downloads. They’d wait through that half an hour Flash loading screen, and they could really go into a virtual world. And this was kind of new. And I think regardless of the gameplay mechanics, or the intention of, you know, like the overall metagame, I think a lot of kids had fun just going into a virtual world and just running and jumping around.

“And I think that there’s a lot of nostalgia surrounding that. You know, like things we did when we were kids.”

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.