How Harry Potter and an amazing demo led to LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game

February 3, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

“When the team shared with me that very first LEGO^® Star Wars^™ demo, that’s probably the seminal key moment in my career. The hairs on the back of my neck just stood up, and I just knew we had something remarkable and special.”

Tom Stone, the recently retired co-founder and managing director of TT Games, was among a number of key people who spoke with LEGO podcast Bits N’ Bricks recently in a wide-ranging series of interviews about the birth of LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game, the creation of TT Games, and the studio’s growth, evolution, and future. 

The interviews include insight into key moments in the history of TT Games and its approach to LEGO video games, which soon became a standard of excellence for family-friendly games and – for a time – the LEGO Group’s core approach to game development.

The inspiration for the LEGO Star Wars video game came from a number of places. The first spark came before Tom Stone was even at the LEGO Group. He said his work at Electronic Arts on an early Harry Potter^™ game helped him realize just how underserved the children’s market was for video games.

Later, when Stone and Jonathan Smith were working at the LEGO Group on games, the two worked together to try and decipher what a LEGO game could and should be.

Around 2003, the duo approached developer Traveller’s Tale to work on a new game based on the Knight’s Kingdom LEGO theme set.

Jon Burton, the studio’s founder, said they decided to take on the project because a contract for another game had fallen through. There was no expectation that this LEGO game would sell well.

But then Stone had a change of heart about basing the game on Knight’s Kingdom. He too was worried it wouldn’t sell well.

“It just occurred to me that, you know, if you were a Jedi Knight^™ and you had control with the force over a pile of LEGO bricks, what could you do with that?” he said. “And that was really the starting point for thinking that Star Wars and LEGO would actually make a really good video game.”

Tom Stone managed to convince LucasArts to let the game use the Star Wars IP with the help of a powerful demo, Stone said. But then they ran into a much bigger problem.

Right around when all of this was going on, the LEGO Group as a whole was going through some tough times, and the company decided to refocus its business back on the core brick experience. That meant cutting things like apparel, theme parks, and the video games division.

So, Stone decided to try and rescue the still-in-development game from the LEGO Group.

To do that, he had to form a small, independent studio with the help of a silent partner and a couple of people at the LEGO Group. He also had to convince the LEGO Group he had the money to fund the rest of the game’s development. That meant he had to put his house on the line. In return, he asked for the LEGO Group to give him the exclusive right to make LEGO games for a period of time.

Fortunately, he succeeded, and his newly founded Giant Interactive was soon overseeing the production of LEGO Star Wars.

“The LEGO team that I was negotiating with were incredibly supportive, fantastic to work with,” he said. “I never had a moment’s hesitation that, you know, once we’d agreed to terms, I could then make a start and not be fearful that they would change their mind or anything else like that.”

Once the game was finished, Stone and the rest of the team ran into another significant problem: No one seemed to want to publish the game.

THQ, Activision, and Electronic Arts all turned down a chance to publish the game. Fortunately, Eidos and Ubisoft were interested, and Giant decided to team up with Eidos on that first game.

When it hit in 2005, it quickly became a commercial and critical success. It was so successful that Burton acquired Giant Interactive and merged it with his studio to form TT Games.

The run of LEGO Star Wars games – which hit in 2005, 2006, and 2007 – 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, Stone said.

The success of the Star Wars games also attracted the attention of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, first to discuss creating a Batman^™ game, but then to acquire TT Games.

Martin Tremblay, who was the president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment at the time, said it was an easy decision because TT Games were breaking records. He added that Kevin Tsujihara, who was the CEO and chairman of Warner Bros. Entertainment at the time, also saw that there was a lot of potential for TT Games at the company. He added that TT Games was one of the key pillars of helping to build up Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment at the time.

“They were bringing a huge amount of revenue per year and numbers of units,” he said. “I mean, every single game was selling five, six million units at the beginning, which was unbelievable.”

Over the next six years, TT Games created 14 games based on some of the biggest fictional properties in history, including Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Marvel. 

That period – from about 2008 to about 2014 – was seen by many as a sort of golden era for the studio. It was also a time that helped to revitalize video games inside the LEGO Group.

“They have allowed a lot of folks in our leadership team, within the LEGO Group, to really understand the value of video games,” said LEGO Group’s Darryl Kelley, who worked with TT Games from 2008’s LEGO Batman through to LEGO City Undercover in 2013.“

It was around 2014 or so that the LEGO Group began to notice a drop in sales of some games and critics began to say the games were becoming formulaic.

Both TT Games strategic manager Jonathan Smith and Arthur Parsons, head of design at the studio, said that wasn’t the case.

“We wince at the suggestion there is a formula and that there was ever a point where any of these games was made without imagination or spirit or a desire to do something new and to innovate or to take the games forward,” Smith said.

Added Parsons: “We’ve made a lot of LEGO games, and I get that some people might think there’s a formula. There really isn’t. The formula is – work really, really hard to make the best game you can to really bring that IP to life in a way that’s never been done before. And that’s it, end of chat – put a game in a box, make sure people enjoy it.”

But LEGO Group’s Philip James said the dip in sales did lead the company to reexamine the number of games coming out from TT Games in such a short period. That, mixed with a desire to expand the breadth of experiences created by the studio, kicked off a new era that seemed to be about pushing game concepts further than ever before.

In 2015, LEGO Dimensions hit, thrusting LEGO video games into the thick of the toys-to-life genre. And in 2017, the company released LEGO Worlds, which dropped players into a world made entirely of bricks that could be pulled apart and put back together.

While the studio did continue its work on some traditional titles, like LEGO Jurassic World and LEGO The Incredibles, the pace began to slow a bit.

Last year marked the first year in the company’s history that it didn’t release a video game.

Instead, Smith said, they were focusing on building out what many believe will be a new studio masterpiece: LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.

“We know that what we’re doing is building up anticipation for the results of what will have been an unprecedented investment and effort that’s been made to create what will be our biggest and best ever LEGO game with LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga,” he said.

Parsons believes the game will become the “flag-bearer for a new era of LEGO video games.”

And the LEGO Group’s Philip James said that nothing is more important than the Skywalker Saga for the company right now.

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.