LEGO Nexo Knights Proved the Power of Gaming

September 15, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

While LEGO Nexo Knights was a massive transmedia property that spanned television, books, magazines, toys, and even an amusement park ride, it was the video game that held the property together and helped propel it to such success.

“The video game was critically important,” said Daniel Mathiasen, who was a partnerships and innovations director at the LEGO Group as the property was coming to life.

The LEGO Nexo Knights: Merlok 2.0 mobile game launched weeks before the theme set went live. The game allowed fans to scan shields found in the toys, magazines, the television show, and unlock powers for the knights. It’s what gave the theme set its key ingredient: collectability.

“We wanted to see if we could introduce that baseball card play pattern that is so popular among kids in a way where it would fuel more play with the bricks, more play around the story and the universe,” Mathiasen said.

The decision to weave collectability into a major LEGO Group property came as the company was investigating ways to create its next “Big Bang.”

Big Bangs at the LEGO Group are major, original, transmedia properties designed to last for years. One of the first was LEGO BIONICLE. Perhaps the most successful has been the company’s Ninjago line, which launched in 2011.

In 2013, the LEGO Group launched another Big Bang, LEGO Legends of Chima, originally intended as a replacement for Ninjago. But that theme set only lasted two years and Ninjago continues to thrive.

The LEGO Group continues to invest in Big Bangs. While digging through the extensive history of the LEGO Group, the team came up with the idea of creating a theme set based on futuristic knights. A core team of 25 began their work in late 2013 and spent about two years in deep development. Those early phases included a lot of focus testing with children as well as simply maturing the product internally.

On May 15, 2015, Nexo Knights got the official internal greenlight, and that small team slowly expanded to a massive group of more than 700.

The team also needed a writer to breathe life into the theme sets and minifigures. That’s where Mark Hoffmeier comes in. He has a long history writing for television, with credits that include the Power Rangers, Spider-Man: The Animated Series, and even a couple of LEGO video games.

But when the LEGO Group contacted him in 2014, it was to discuss an upcoming television show tied to an emerging LEGO theme set still under wraps based on futuristic pirates.

Because the LEGO Group hadn’t contracted Hoffmeier yet, they gave him a fake property to work on, just to see what he could do. They switched the Nexo Knights for pirates.

Hoffmeier was hired after delivering an inspired approach to those pirates, and then created the bible for the theme set, scripts for the upcoming show, and the story for the video game.

The LEGO Group flew him to Billund to work with the LEGO team. During his five-day stint, he and others on the project spitballed ideas and nailed down the basic concepts around Nexo Knights. On that Friday, they presented their story ideas to everyone involved in the project, and the approach was approved.

Over the following months, they also nailed down the title of the property, which was initially going to be called the Knights of Knighton, and the LEGO Group brought on Frima Studio in Quebec to build out the video game.

Fortunately, the LEGO Group had a growing level of expertise in incorporating digital play into physical toys. Its work on projects like Life of George, for instance, prepared them for some of the challenges they could face with Nexo Knights and the shield scanning technology.

Nexo Knights debuted with the television show first, on December 13, 2015. About a week later, the LEGO Nexo Knights; Merlok 2.0 video game hit smartphones. The first wave of theme sets followed on January 2, 2016.

Mads Prahm, who was the production director on the property, said it had a strong launch, but that in the long run it didn’t deliver the level of success that the LEGO Group was hoping for.

“The LEGO Group had really big expectations for sales, and those weren’t quite being met,” he said. “The company had been experiencing this double-digit growth over a decade at the time, and so expectations were really that sales would just be fantastic. And when they weren’t fantastic, because it was taking consumers and kids a little bit longer to discover this new IP, then everybody was disappointed.“

It’s hard to reconcile the feeling internally that maybe Nexo Knights wasn’t doing very well with the external reception to the theme set and its longevity. In less than two years, there were 40 television episodes, more than 100 sets, a popular video game, a magazine, several books, and even a 4D film that debuted as a ride at Legoland Windsor Resort in 2016.

But held up against the likes of Ninjago, the success of Nexo Knights dims.

“Ninjago was always the bar that we’re trying to raise, and with Chima, the company went all in, and even with an online game and TV show and all of those things they didn’t manage to make it as big as Ninjago,” Prahm said. “And the same with Nexo Knights – and I would say actually, with some of the themes that came after – we’re still measuring those up against Ninjago.

“I think that makes sense that, when you do something new, it has to be better than what you’ve done before. But I think it’s just really tough to beat these ninjas.”

Ultimately, Nexo Knights wound down in the fall of 2017, a decision fueled by the waning impact of traditional television and the sudden, monumental success of Pokémon Go.

Although Nexo Knights wasn’t able to make the same transformative leap from successful Big Bang to thriving evergreen product, it left an impact on the LEGO Group, showing just how powerful a video game can be when tied inexorably to a theme set.

“I think what made Nexo Knights magical was the game that tied everything together,” Prahm said. “And not only the core game loop of battling with the characters but more this metagame that kind of allows you to collect all of these powers and go on a treasure hunt looking for hidden shields. All of that went into making it something bigger than just a toy and a TV show.”

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.