How LEGO Harry Potter Helped Reshape LEGO Video Games

November 10, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

The LEGO Harry Potter games didn’t just introduce a new way to explore a brickified version of a beloved fantasy world – they also proved to developer TT Games that the studio could branch beyond the traditional action titles that focused on combat and physical confrontation, to create games with a more explorative nature.

It was, for those who worked on the two games, a dream project.

“I think the memories that were made on the two LEGO Harry Potter video games, those three and a half years are probably some of my fondest because it was a prolonged period of time of just being immersed in this amazing world,” said Arthur Parsons, who was the game director on both titles. “It’s probably my fondest memories.”

She was over the moon when he first heard that TT Games would be getting a chance to turn that fiction into a LEGO game or games.

Parsons said he adored the Harry Potter books since the first – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, also known as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – hit in 1997. The books continued for a decade, and his love for them grew. A series of movies just as delightful as the books began in 2001. The film adaptation of The Philosopher’s Stone was followed by Chamber of Secrets the following year, Prisoner of Azkaban in 2004, Goblet of Fire in 2005, and Order of the Phoenix in 2007.

Initially the discussions at the studio centered around how exactly to divvy up the source material. There was so much presented in those movies and books – and so much potential in the universe – that the team had to figure out the best way to turn all of that into a game that did the property and its compelling stories justice.

Then the team started looking at the future game through a different lens.

“Do we do one book, one movie at a time?” Parsons asked. “It was a real challenge. And what we actually did was, we actually sat there and thought, ‘Let’s just put that to one side and think about what the player experience is that we want games to have.’”

The solution was to focus instead on the experience of being a witch or wizard attending Hogwarts™. One of the key problems solved by this approach was that unlike something like Star Wars™ – which is packed with iconic adventures that feature good versus evil battles – Harry Potter was a much more narratively driven piece of storytelling. It was, at its heart, the tale of Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s journey through adolescence and into adulthood.

That ultimately led the team into creating what would become the games’ biggest character: A living, breathing, detailed version of Hogwarts, which also helped turn the game into a massive space where players don’t have to rely on combat to have fun.

Once the team knew they were going to make Hogwarts not just the setting, but an integral part of the game’s experience, they had to figure out what parts of the school to focus on and, just as challenging, how to depict them.

Ultimately, the team decided to focus on the first four books and movies of Harry Potter for the first game, due for a 2010 release. That decision was driven in part by the movies that were still coming out.

“There’s no way you could get all of that stuff into one game,” Parsons said. “There’s just so much source material. So we just looked at it and thought, ‘Let’s just split it in half.”

There’s also a tonal shift in the books and movies around that fifth year at Hogwarts. Harry and his friends are getting older, they’re dealing with more personal issues, and the Wizarding World itself is starting to see some pretty dark events looming. All of which meant that year four and Goblet of Fire felt like a natural breaking point for the two games.

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 hit pretty much every platform in the summer of 2010, landing neatly between the theatrical releases of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in 2009 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 in 2010.

After a short holiday break, work started on the sequel: LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5–7, a game that brought forward all of the learnings and general approach of the first game, but also a whole slew of new challenges. Not least of which: the much darker subject matter.

“For anyone that’s watched the movies or read the books, there are some areas, some moments, that are incredibly dark,” Parsons said. “How are we going to do these moments? There are some pretty dramatic sort of sequences that we had to look at and go right, ‘What are we going to do here?’

“We can kind of try and make light of it in a way that only we could with the LEGO video games.”

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 hit in November 2011, just months after the conclusion of the Harry Potter films with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2.

Like the first LEGO Harry Potter title, it was well-received.

Both games were combined for the LEGO Harry Potter Collection which hit in 2018, bringing the games to the PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

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.