How a Caped Crusader LEGO Game Led to a Massive Buyout

September 23, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

A $210 million video game acquisition that became a formative pillar of a major studio’s investment in the game industry may not have happened had it not been for a tiny caped crusader.

Fresh off the success of the initial series of LEGO® Star Wars™ video games, developer TT Games was looking for a way to prove that they could bring their magic to a new franchise.

“The team was asking, ‘What are we going to do next?’ and we’re having conversations, looking ahead,” said TT Games director Jonathan Smith. “Where do we go from here? This seems to be working, but proving that it can work beyond Star Wars™ was absolutely the next problem to solve.”

Smith said the team started looking at other possible world-renowned properties and decided to meet with DC Comics and discuss Batman™. That turned into a licensing discussion with Warner Bros. Entertainment, which led to a chat with the head of the company at the time: Kevin Tsujihara.

Ultimately, the success of that Batman deal lead the two companies to agree to an acquisition, Smith said.

Martin Tremblay, who would go on to run Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment from 2008 to 2016, said the success TT Games had with their original LEGO Star Wars™ creations grabbed the attention of everyone in the video game industry.

“They were breaking records, and very wisely Warner, lead back then by Kevin Tsujihara, had the vision that they could make something even bigger within Warner,” Tremblay said. “They were one of the key pillars of building up Warner Brothers interactive.”

Warner Bros. purchased TT Games in November 2007, when the studio was developing not just LEGO Batman: The Videogame, but also LEGO Indiana Jones™: The Original Adventures.

TT Games started work first on LEGO Batman: The Videogame, but the team quickly learned that it is impossible to create anything tied to the Caped Crusader in a vacuum. To start with, there is more than 80 years’ worth of comic books. Then there are the newspaper comics, the radio dramas, television shows, a stage show, past video games, and of course the movies.

Early on, Warner Bros. and DC comics gave the folks at TT Games a bit of freedom. They weren’t, for instance, asked to tie this first LEGO Batman game to the Nolan movies. Both understood those movies tended to skew a little bit older than the traditional core audience that TT Game’s titles attracted.

Facing a massive timeline, as well as a huge list of enemies and fellow heroes, the development team settled on a specific approach to figuring out what should and shouldn’t be included in the game.

“We started with the classic tropes of Batman, going all the way back to Adam West, grappling up buildings, throwing batarangs, wearing capes,” said John Hodskinson, who headed up programming on the game. ”And obviously, being a LEGO game, we wanted those characters to have a number of abilities. So we arrived at the concept of suits, which was quite a Batman thing, certainly, going back to the comics.”

The team also came up with an interesting approach to the game’s story. Instead of simply dropping players into one of Batman’s many existing adventures, they decided to create an entirely original plot – a first for TT Games. They also broke the campaign up into two distinct storylines: One told the story of Batman and Robin as they fought the villains and the other cast players as the villains carrying out their nefarious plans.

About six months into the game’s development, news came down that most of the team would have to shift over to work on LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

The run of LEGO Star Wars™ games was so popular that LucasArts approached TT Games to ask them if they could use the same treatment to create a LEGO Indiana Jones game. They wanted a game that could go live alongside the new movie in 2008, which meant refocusing the team’s attention to get that game out before LEGO Batman: The Videogame.

A skeleton team was left to work on Batman as the bulk of the developers wrapped up Indiana Jones. Some of the lessons they learned while working on Indiana Jones came back with the team as they returned to Batman. That included refined workflows and tools and even some game mechanics.

LEGO Batman: The Video game launched in the fall of 2008 and did well thanks not just to the subject matter, but also its ties to a console.

It wasn’t long until TT Games started thinking about making a sequel to their Batman video game hit. The success of the first title made that decision easy.

One of the biggest changes that came with LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes was TT Games’ decision to add voice acting to the game. Previously, that was something more associated with the LEGO video games of the early ‘90s than the TT Games titles.

Darryl Kelley, producer on LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes and LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, said TT Games director Jonathan Smith deserves credit for the original idea, which he championed very early in the development process. They had been experimenting with the idea, and once they saw it in action, they felt like it was a perfect fit. Darryl said voices made a huge difference. When LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes was released in June 2012, the team also delivered an impressive soundtrack, bringing in some of the Danny Elfman score from the 1989 Batman movie as well as the John Williams score from the 1978 Superman movie.

The decision to create a third LEGO Batman video game, which wrapped up the trilogy in November 2014, came shortly after the release of the second when it became clear that the franchise was still getting quite a bit of traction.

Where LEGO Batman 2 had 75 playable characters, LEGO Batman 3 had more than 200.

The LEGO Batman Movie Game hit mobile phones in 2017, and a spinoff called LEGO DC Super-Villains, which featured 270 playable characters, followed LEGO Batman 3 in October 2018 on consoles and PC.

That means that Batman has had more LEGO video games made about him and his cohorts than any other third-party franchise in LEGO Games history, outside of Star Wars™.

Kelley has a theory about why that is.

“I would say simply because the universe within DC is just so vast,” he said. “You have an established storyline with established comics and history that go way back. Batman himself is hugely iconic. The awareness around Batman is through the charts. So to be able to lean on an intellectual property like Batman I think has been very fortunate for the LEGO Group.”

Kelley added that, outside of LEGO Star Wars™, no franchise has had as big an impact on TT Games’ ability to continue to make games and make them profitable for the LEGO Group.

“If we didn’t have the LEGO Batman franchise, it may have been a different story of where the LEGO Group went in terms of video game strategy and investment in that team,” he said. “It definitely played an important part in the history of the LEGO video game timeline.”

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.