How the New York Game Scene Gave Birth to Everyone’s Favorite Garbage Game

August 18, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

When LEGO® Builder’s Journey hit Apple Arcade in 2019, it was seen as a new sort of LEGO video game, one that eschewed the artful action mashups of so many of the popular LEGO titles.

Instead of putting you in the blocky legs of a minifig and retelling the story of a beloved franchise like Star Wars™, Indiana Jones™, or Harry Potter™, LEGO Builder’s Journey had you embody the LEGO brick and in so doing explore the nature of the toy’s deep creative soul.

While Builder’s Journey’s entirely original tale of a father and son connecting was embraced by gamers around the world, Lightbrick Studio’s first game was also accidentally retracing the roots of a far less poetic and emotive story: Junkbot.

In 2001’s Junkbot, as with Builder’s Journey, players don’t control the eponymous hero. Rather they use LEGO bricks to build his path and set him on a journey. It just so happens that Junkbot’s journey is more about eating trash and slyly looking at the player than bonding.

Both games, nearly two decades part, come from a deep exploration of what it means to be a LEGO video game and how to capture the essence of LEGO play digitally.

With Junkbot, that journey started back in 1995 at Word Magazine, a website that pushed hard on the edges of interactive experiences by mixing together stories, interviews, games, music, and the like to deliver experimental content.

“We published a lot of literary nonfiction and autobiographical nonfiction, but we also had a lot of interactive experiments like motion comics and flash animations and sort of audio experiences and things like that,” said Naomi Clark, who was an editor on the website back in the late ‘90s. “Because we were in the experimental early days of the web, we were trying to figure out the best ways to use this new medium.”

One of those experiments was an idea Clark had to create an online game for the site, a multi-user dungeon – a precursor to games like World of Warcraft. As producer, Naomi Clark brought on lead programmer Ranjit Bhatnagar, art director Yoshi Sodeoka, and game designer Eric Zimmerman to create the game.

This collection of creators developed Sissyfight 2000, a cute online social game that had players taking on the role of little girls in a playground and striving to maintain their self-esteem while lowering the self-esteem of their playmates. And it was a surprisingly massive hit for Word.com.

And when Word.Com closed, it was Sissyfight 2000 that helped Clark land a job at LEGO.com, supporting the expansion of the official LEGO Group website, which had launched in 1996.

Thanks to the tremendous response to BIONICLE’s Mata Nui Online game, Clark was able to convince the company to invest more in games for the website, and her first step was to dive back into the New York game development scene.

Two of the people she had worked with on Sissyfight 2000 – Eric Zimmerman and Ranjit Bhatnagar – along with Peter Lee and Frank Lantz had teamed up in a studio called Gamelab. The studio would go on to develop dozens of games for brands as diverse as HBO, PlayFirst, Nickelodeon, and – of course — the LEGO Group. They are probably best known for creating Diner Dash in 2003, which at one point was one of the most downloaded games of all time.

That connection between Clark, Zimmerman, and the rest of the Gamelab crew would eventually lead to a lasting relationship between Gamelab and the LEGO Group, with the studio creating a dozen games for the website. But the first was, perhaps, the most memorable: Junkbot.

When Clark approached Gamelab about making a game, the studio came up with a two-part pitch document that explored the play values of the LEGO Group and offered up a number of ideas.

“The concept that the LEGO Group selected was about a character that walked on its own in a sort of a 2D platformer kind of world that you were building staircases and moving LEGO bricks around to kind of help them get around,” Zimmerman said.

Lantz said the core mechanic was based around the notion that players would be tasked with building the level instead of controlling the character.

“What kind of game can you make that really embodies the fun of playing with LEGO bricks?” Lantz said. “Well, let’s do a platformer where instead of controlling the character, you construct the level, and everything else just flows from that core mechanic. Once you have that idea, then you spend a lot of time on the basic controls of how you manipulate brick.”

Zimmerman notes that, of the many games he has worked on during his long career in the video game industry, Junkbot remains one that came with an important design lesson.

In the case of most games, you have to nail the core mechanic first and make it fun on its own. Everything else is just frosting on that cake. But in the case of Junkbot, the opposite was true.

“The main challenge that we faced was getting stuff into the game,” he said. “And that goes against this deeply ingrained common sense wisdom for how you make a good game, which is that you find a core mechanic, and the core mechanic is fun. In this case, the core mechanic was conceptually interesting but experientially lacking.

“Sometimes you make a cake and it’s so good you don’t need the frosting, and other times the frosting makes the cake. So in the case of Junkbot, it was the frosting.”

While not a massive hit when Junkbot arrived on LEGO.com in 2001, it quickly grew a following, and that following remains today despite not being able to play the game on the website, or without considerable effort.

Junkbot’s lasting appeal is evident in several ways, including that every so often it pops up in other LEGO Group products. More immediately, though, the game’s success helped to prove that games on the LEGO.com website were a good idea.

The game’s enduring popularity was in some ways also fueled by the sequel, Junkbot Undercover.

Eric Zimmerman said that all of the work the team put into trying to boil down the experience of playing with physical LEGO bricks contributed to the game’s success.

“I think we just did a really good job of translating certain aspects of the kind of modular construction-based play, and we went farther afield and explored other aspects of building with LEGO bricks,” he said.

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.