LEGO Legacy: Heroes Unboxed is a Minifig Nostalgia Machine

August 25, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

LEGO® Legacy: Heroes Unboxed isn’t just a fun, team-based tactical role-playing game. It’s also a powerful nostalgia machine packed with a surprising amount of minifig and theme set facts, history, and minutely detailed models.

The game actually started without a core gameplay mechanic or even a genre. Instead, it was born out of a desire by developer Gameloft Toronto to create an experience that tapped into the love and memories that the adult fans of LEGO community have for minifigures.

In many ways, the game’s development and even what it delivers can be broken up into two distinct parts: The strategy role-playing game where players battle using a team of five minifigs that they construct, and the deep historical examination and portrayal of not just the game’s minifigures but even some classic LEGO theme sets.

The examination of the LEGO Group’s storied history started with visits to the LEGO Group’s own massive archives in Billund, Denmark.

“Let me tell you, if you want to see a grown man cry, put them in the LEGO archives,” said Gameloft Toronto design director Ryan Hill, who was among those who made the trip to Billund. “It just is bound to happen. You know, you just start seeing all the old LEGO toys from your childhood in the flesh, in sealed boxes built in front of your very eyes, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I remember this!’ Even the obscure sets that like only you would know. They’re all there. Right? Like, I saw the whole batch of BIONICLES, and I lost my mind. It totally brought me back.”

Brian Cook, lead producer at Gameloft Toronto, said the trip wasn’t just emotional. It also helped to underscore the value of nostalgia for LEGO toys.

“What became interesting for us was, every time we brought someone new onto the team, and we said, ‘We’re going to make a LEGO game,’ their eyes lit up, and you could tell they were having an emotional response to it,” he said. “And so we started realizing we needed to dig into those. And so what we quickly found was, everybody had a story about a set that they either had that they love, but usually it was about the set that somebody else had, or they had looked at in the window, and they really wanted it.”

While those trips to Billund were instrumental in fleshing out the core concepts behind the game, they came after early development was underway.

Work on LEGO Legacy: Minifigures Unboxed started as summer gave way to early fall in 2016. The two companies had already been discussing working together on a possible project, but that project hadn’t taken shape yet. That’s where Brian Cook came in, brought on to lead an early team that would focus on prototyping ideas.

“We actually went through about a year and a half of prototyping R&D, where we pitched a bunch of different games, what we thought would be interesting,” Cook said. “And I think we went through three distinct games.”

Most of the debate was centered around things like how much to appeal to adult fans versus ensuring the game is child-friendly, as well as how a game might honor these two distinct groups of potential players.

The studio settled on the team RPG approach in late 2018. The decision to create a team-focused, strategy RPG came after examining the sorts of games that were doing well in the mobile game space and identifying which ones they thought would work well for unearthing and playing with a deep roster of characters.

The studio also felt it was important to figure out a way to reconnect with adults who are in what the LEGO Group sometimes refers to as the dark ages – the period of time between a childhood spent playing with LEGO bricks and an adult rediscovering that love.

They found a perfect example of what they were hoping to achieve in The LEGO Movie.

“We were like, ‘Oh my God!’ when that movie came out, ‘this is what we’ve been trying to do,’” Hill said. “It was really inspirational for us. So we were trying to capture that and really figure out what it was that was going to pull these older players back into LEGO toys.”

As one part of the team worked on the game design and mechanics, others focused on how best to deliver that nostalgia that they knew fans would love.

One result: The group incorporated a bunch of fun facts about each figure and set. They also wanted to let players see the creations in detail, up close – and in the case of the theme sets, actually watch them being built in real-time in 3D.

To ensure they got everything perfect, they needed the original sets to recreate them. But it turns out that, while the LEGO Group has archives of every set and minifig ever made, they don’t have sets to spare.

So Søren Vejgaard, the LEGO Group product lead on the game, set about on his own internet dig.

“We actually bought every single set and every single minifigure inside the game and delivered them to Gameloft,” he said. “That way, they had them for reference when they were animating a minifigure or they were building a set. They always had the physical set or minifigure as a reference.”

The result is a game that captures these sets and minifigs in a historically accurate way. Take, for instance, the 1978 police officer minifig found in the game. He didn’t have a printed decal on his torso when he was originally released. It was a sticker.

“If you look inside the game, he’s wearing a sticker. It’s not printed on his torso,” Vejgaard said. “They did these beautiful animations where you see the sets being built when you unlock them. And they sort of show all the things that you might not remember about those sets, like, you know, that there was like a trapdoor in this build, actually hidden somewhere. And, you know, you don’t remember that. But when you see that animation play, it plays out, you suddenly have that flashback to when you build the kit.”

The game launched in 2020 and found a strong fan base waiting to play it.

Since its release, the folks at Gameloft have focused on adding new sets, events, and minifigures – including the Ghostbusters™. And it seems that – as predicted – the real draw of the game is the nostalgia people have for those wonderful LEGO toys.

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.