Inside one of the most important LEGO games ever made

December 8, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

One of the LEGO Group’s first ideas for a video game turned out to be its most enduring.

LEGO Creator was envisioned as the kickoff to a series of titles that would recreate the experience of playing with physical LEGO bricks, but in a digital world without real-world constraints like cost and storage.

Despite being a ‘90s blue-sky idea, what LEGO Creator would become managed to overshadow even those grand plans.

Today, LEGO Digital Designer – the modern incarnation of LEGO Creator – is used to help make LEGO movies, video games, and even to design toys. It’s also used by fans to empower their real-world building and augment fan-created games.

It all started back in 1996 when LEGO Media International was just establishing itself. Rob Smith, an executive producer at LMI in London, said he was working with a team that was trying to come up with some video game concepts that would form the pillars of the LEGO Group’s efforts in gaming.

The idea for LEGO Creator, he said, bubbled up during a brainstorming session. It was inspired in part by the LEGO Group’s Strategic Product Unit Darwin’s early work to digitize the LEGO brick.

“LEGO Creator was designed to be sort of the quintessential game that would represent the LEGO Group in a virtual interactive environment,” Smith said. “It was supposed to take the idea of play materials and allow children to build them in a PC environment that would allow them to deconstruct, as well as construct, and also play. So, it was to mirror what the play materials did in real life, but actually utilize the technology of the day in interesting and unique ways that couldn’t happen in the real world.

“That’s why we thought the LEGO Group would be interested in doing this. It bridged the two worlds of physical play materials and the interactive space of video games beautifully well.”

The team at LMI brought in British developer Superscape to turn this idea into a video game, and the group set to work creating this digital embodiment of the LEGO brick experience.

LEGO Creator launched on Nov. 11, 1998, as a sort of LEGO set simulator, allowing players to build inside a virtual LEGO environment, clicking bricks together to create whatever their imagination could conceive – or at least approaching that.

The ambition for LEGO Creator went beyond a single game. Smith said the plan was to create future games based on different LEGO theme sets.

While that came to fruition to some degree, Smith wasn’t around at LEGO Media International to see it happen. He left LMI in 1999. But the game continued to chug along without him.

In 2000, LEGO Creator: Knights’ Kingdom was released. As its name implies, the game focused on building a medieval kingdom and acting out battles.

Then 2001 saw the release of LEGO Creator: Harry Potter™, delivering the popular Wizarding World to the blossoming LEGO Creator series. This third iteration of the franchise was also the first-ever LEGO video game based on a licensed property. It also marked the last time developer Superscape would work on the franchise.

By the time LEGO Creator: Harry Potter rolled out, the LEGO Group was reexamining its video game business, and in this case, the look and feel of its popular line of LEGO Creator games.

Qube Software CEO Servan Keondjian said the LEGO Group approached his company looking for better technology, specifically better graphics for the Creator games. They asked Qube to look at the titles to get their input.

Ultimately, the LEGO Group decided to bring on Qube and have them start from scratch when developing the next game, Creator: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets™. But there was an unusual challenge. While Qube was being asked to create this title based on the Chamber of Secrets, Electronic Arts – which was the game’s publisher – was also working on its own Chamber of Secrets game. So they didn’t want this one to lean too heavily into the plot and gameplay of the movie and book. Instead, Keondjian said, they wanted something that was a bit more focused on the sandbox building.

As Qube walked the fine line between too much and not enough gameplay, they were in deep talks with the LEGO Group about the building side of the game and the engineering going into recreating that experience.

Qube managed to nail the game and get Creator: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets out the door in 2002. It marked the last LEGO Creator title ever released, but not because it wasn’t well received. If anything, it was because it was too good at recreating the experience of building with LEGO bricks in a digital setting.

While Qube was diligently working away on the last LEGO Creator game, there was movement afoot inside the LEGO Group to take the technology powering that game and turn it into something much more important to the core of the LEGO Group, a tool that could be used by fans and employees alike, a creation that would harken back to the days of SPU Darwin and that initial idea of turning the full LEGO brick library into digital form for all to use however they wanted.

Keondjian said what would eventually become LEGO Digital Designer started its life as an idea within the LEGO Group and the skilled handiwork of Qube on Creator: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

“It was a sort of skunkworks within the LEGO Group,” Keondjian said. “Certain people in management at the LEGO Group knew that we had the potential to build a really good building tool, and they believed in us.

“I was very keen to build a pure prototype for LEGO Digital Designer, which at that time we called Lego Arena.”

The LEGO Group’s Ronny Scherer said that the company looked at a number of ideas bringing this concept to life. Among those: going to Qube to see if they could essentially extract the building component of the game they just created and use that to create a powerful tool.

“They earned a lot of trust very quickly for me personally, because they seem to have the grasp on the things that we thought were important, in terms of executing a building experience in 3D,” Scherer said. “I remember that team just sort of showed some really impressive demos and a path forward.”

Because Project Arena was built on the bones of the latest Creator game, it didn’t take long to build that first working prototype, envisioned as something that would turn into a tool not just for crafting LEGO brick creations, but LEGO video games.

The original version of LEGO Digital Designer hit in 2004. Shortly thereafter, the LEGO Group rolled out support that allowed people using LDD to order physical versions of their models under the LEGO Factory and LEGO Design byMe programs.

A few years after releasing LEGO Digital Designer, Qube pitched the idea of turning the LDD tool back into a LEGO video game.

Not only did the LEGO Group pass on the idea, but it also decided to take LDD back from Qube and continue its development internally.

Keondjian said he thinks the decision was fueled by a desire to have total control over a project that was becoming an important part of the company’s core efforts in the realm of digital creations.

For the third time in its history, the sandbox creator software was scrapped, and the new team – once more an internal team at the LEGO Group – started from scratch, completely rebuilding LEGO Digital Designer.

Since its creation, LEGO Digital Designer has branched off in many interesting directions. Of course, there was the ability to create a digital model and then have a physical version shipped to you. But shortly after its release, LDD was being used by the LEGO Group’s own designers to sketch out ideas made of LEGO bricks. Game developers used the tool to help with their design work and creation pipeline. A version of the software was given to the team behind The LEGO Movie™, which used it to rough out their LEGO brick builds. And fans continue to use it to create their own real-world models and video games.

From its inception back in 1996 to today, LEGO Creator remains one of the longest-lived, most important games in the LEGO Group’s more than 25-year history in video games.

“There’s an immense amount of pride, not just in the end product, but also working with an incredible team of developers, non-traditional game developers that created something that actually had much longer legs than the many, many games around that time, or even nowadays – a huge amount of pride,” Smith said. “I think it surpassed the quality bar and our expectations.”

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.