LEGO Minifigures Don’t Have Knees

January 27, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

The LEGO® minifigure plays an enormous role in just about every LEGO video game created, but it turns out the video games have also played a bit of a role in the creation of LEGO minifigures.

Video games, and the depiction of the LEGO minifigure in motion, were one of the reasons that the LEGO Group decided to create The Complete LEGO Minifigure Guidelines in 2010.

The more than 300-page tome details how to create and represent minifigures correctly and was put together by the LEGO Group’s Matthew Ashton and Tara Wike, among others.

Wike started at the LEGO Group in 2009, working on designing elements for the LEGO Minifigures collectibles product line. She took over as creative lead for the project shortly after starting.

During her time working on the regular release of minifigure collectibles, Wike helped to design the little LEGO people from concept to final production.

By 2018, she shifted over to become a senior design manager at the LEGO Group, working as the main point of contact for anyone looking to use minifigures in books, movies, television shows, theme parks, and video games.

That work includes making sure the minifigures don’t bend or stretch in ways that wouldn’t be possible with real minifigures – like giving the digital versions knees when they don’t have them in plastic form, she said.

“There was plenty of knees happening when we put the guidelines together,” she said. “So, I don’t know who started breaking that rule first, but it was well broken by the time I got there. In fact, we had to kind of reel it in with the squishiness in a lot of places. They got to the point where in some areas, there were so many liberties being taken that you could barely recognize that really it was a minifigure anymore.

“The limitations of the minifigure are both part of its charm and part of its frustration as a designer. And that is true for toy designers working at the LEGO Group as much as it is for digital game designers.”

Wike was also directly involved with the development of the LEGO Minifigures Online video game created and released by Funcom in 2015. These days she spends as much time working with game developers as other teams, guiding them through the ever-growing book of minifigure rules.

With billions of minifigures now in existence in hundreds of different forms, Wike still believes the diminutive, little toy has plenty of life left in it.

“I think that we see that there’s obviously something timeless about the minifigure,” she said. “There’s just something about it. The scale. The proportions, you know? The original designer just hit on something similar to our two by four brick. It just fits in the hand and connects in such a way that it just speaks to people. So, I don’t think we’re going to lose the minifigure anytime soon. Whether we’ll experiment with other figure types, maybe, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

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.