How LEGO City Undercover Changed the Face of LEGO Games

June 16, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

Before it was a hidden gem packed with pop culture referential humor, hundreds of unique drivable vehicles, and a living open world, LEGO® City Undercover was a dream: a wish made by a game studio specializing in portable games to create something bigger, better, different.

TT Fusion was perhaps best known for bringing excellent ports of TT Games’ masterful creations to handheld platforms. It delivered LEGO Star Wars™, LEGO Indiana Jones, and LEGO Batman games to Nintendo DS without sacrificing quality.

But a chance to create something different – both for the studio and TT Games as a whole – with LEGO Rock Band fueled the studio’s desire to think outside the LEGO brick box.

With development on the rhythm game wrapping up, the folks at TT Fusion were being asked to work on more console titles and were trying to decide what they wanted to do next.

“It was an interesting, exciting time,” said Matt Palmer, who is now the studio’s animation director. “We were in discussions about the next project. There were many ideas being bandied around. But an open-world game was something that we hadn’t actually done at that point. And it became more and more exciting the more we talked about it.”

As enthusiasm grew for creating a LEGO game that broke free of TT Games’ adventure formula, the team at TT Fusion began prototyping ideas.

“We started to put a team together to say, ‘If we were to do an open world, how would we do it?'” Palmer said. “What would we need? What technologies would we need? How many animators would we need?”

The team was working on generic LEGO brick prototypes when another idea entered the mix. The LEGO Group, it turned out, had long wanted to create an original title using the company’s immensely popular LEGO City theme sets.

Soon, the TT Fusion team was roughing out ideas for an open-world game built around the LEGO City theme set. And that ended up raising a lot of early questions. Specifically, the team settled on leaning into the LEGO City theme set’s police range, which meant figuring out how to do things like violence and weapons.

“What can we do with that sort of range?” Palmer said. “Are we allowed to use weapons? Are we allowed to use any sort of comedy violence? Or do we have to just scale all that sort of side back? So, it was kind of a really exploratory phase.

“It seemed like that went on for years and years and years, but it was probably only about eight or nine months, where we actually had some fun and just said, ‘What things could we do if we have these characters?'”

Then, in 2011, Nintendo came to the LEGO Group with a surprising offer: It wanted the company to co-develop a title for the soon-to-be-released Wii U console, an offer that energized the team at TT Fusion.

Now the team was developing an open-world LEGO game set in one of the company’s most important themes for a console that hadn’t yet launched. The hope was that the game could deliver a new experience, using a popular LEGO Group franchise, and help establish a strong relationship with Nintendo, something that the LEGO Group had been working to achieve for years.

Because of the game’s importance to both the LEGO Group and Nintendo, there was a lot of direct involvement between the two companies and developer TT Fusion.

“They were very, very involved,” said Darryl Kelley, who was the LEGO Group producer on the game. “Everything from, obviously, the development side, right down through the marketing piece, and the plans to actually go to market with the title, was handled by key stakeholders.

“We worked hand-in-hand with Nintendo of America. We would talk about the game development, we would review builds, and at the same time, provide our feedback and help to QA. So they were very, very involved in terms of not only the development but also trying to make sure it lived up to the quality that we would all expect from both Nintendo and the LEGO Group. We actually had to give our CEO at the time, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, a private demo of the game.”

LEGO City Undercover featured an expansive, explorable city that blended bits of places like San Francisco, New York, and London into one cohesive world. It also included more than 200 unique vehicles, each designed to have a different feel and look.

TT Fusion tapped comedian Graham Goring to write the game’s story, which helped to smooth out the rough edges of the game’s core conceit and inject an enormous amount of humor.

“They had the jokes for the mums and dads; they had the jokes for the kids,” Palmer said. “It felt like a nice, well-rounded, fun game to sit down to with even grandma and granddad all the way down to five, 6-year-olds. There was an element in that writing that just sat with everyone. It really bonded players, especially family players. Graham was the starting point of it all. He was so involved in it, he almost lived and breathed it. There’re probably hundreds of thousands of ideas that never made the game. But yeah, we kind of all played off what Graham wrote, so it kind of helped grow the game.”

While LEGO City Undercover included references and parodies to countless television shows and movies, what it didn’t include, but almost did, was a zombie horde.

Early on, the studio was working to build out the game with a wide selection of LEGO minifigs. Among them was a zombie.

“We were tinkering around with some settings to try and get something else working and managed to spawn in a crowd of zombies,” Palmer said. “And everybody just went, ‘That’d be brilliant!’ but then straight away went, ‘But we don’t think the LEGO Group would go for that.’”

The idea of LEGO minifig zombies wandering the brick-filled streets of LEGO City is one of the few pushbacks that the LEGO Group’s producer Kelley remembers from development.

“I remember looking at a couple of builds, where maybe some bonus levels or situations were actually created that definitely went too far,” he said. “I remember one specific example, where you could actually have the citizens of LEGO City Undercover become zombies. They wouldn’t eat you, but they would just walk around and look like zombies. It was hysterical and amazing to see, but there was some concern about whether it was going a little too far. Is that going to scare children?”

Unlike the zombie horde, other ideas that started as mistakes did make their way into the game, like the ability to enlarge a LEGO minifig to five times its initial size, sit on vehicles, and ride them like a skateboard.

Although conceived as a launch title for the Wii U, LEGO City Undercover hit stores not on the new console’s November launch date but within the launch window of the system, on March 18, 2013.

LEGO City Undercover was well received, with Eurogamer lauding the great writing and “twinkling level design” that had players coming back for more. The solid reviews, positive general reception, and fun use of the Wii U’s extra features did more than move nearly 2 million copies of the game. They also nourished the blossoming relationship between Nintendo and the LEGO Group, Darryl noted. Ultimately, that relationship would result in the development and release of the LEGO Super Mario toy building sets.

While the studio was happy with the game’s reception, the internal support it received, and just how much the developers were able to pack into LEGO City Undercover, some were a bit disappointed that the game was available on just one system.

Unfortunately, the Wii U also wasn’t doing very well. By the time that LEGO City Undercover was released – about four months after the console’s launch – just 3.5 million or so Wii U systems had been sold. By comparison, Nintendo’s preceding console, the Wii, sold more than 3 million systems in its first month. And the Wii U’s successor, the Nintendo Switch, sold just under 3 million in its first month.

But then, in November 2016, publisher Warner Bros. Interactive announced that a remastered version of the game was headed to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One. The new version was released in April 2017, a bit more than four years after the original Wii U exclusive.

For many who worked on the game and the players who explored their way through the packed city of play, LEGO City Undercover remains a masterpiece. It’s a title that highlights TT Fusion’s shift from handheld development to beefy LEGO play on consoles and PC, and it’s one of TT Game’s expansive, non-linear creations.

“I always say that LEGO City Undercover is the greatest game,” Kelley said. “There were so many amazing people at TT Games and Nintendo who just came together as a team to really produce what, in my mind, is that great advancement of our games.

“It helped to open the doors, I think, for a lot of other games that would include a kind of open sandbox type environments within our games, like what you would see in a LEGO Marvel game. And, yeah, it was a long time coming.”

TT Fusion’s Matt Palmer said that, of all the games he’s worked on, LEGO City Undercover remains his favorite.

“Without a doubt, and without hesitation,” he said. “It’s one of those games that I think everybody that worked on it enjoyed so much and had such a good time. And the team behind it, we all just kind of gelled together as a group. I hope that shows in the game. I really do because I think it’s fantastic.”

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.