Rocket Racer, Veronica Voltage, and the Legend of LEGO Racers
June 30, 2021LEGO Racers started life in a digital brick vacuum.
High Voltage Software founder Kerry Ganofsky became obsessed with the idea of creating a video game that would allow players to build little cars with digital LEGO bricks, and then plop them onto a track and race them against minifigs.
While LEGO Fun to Build was the first video game featuring the colorful bricks, it was an educational title released only in Japan in 1995 on the short-lived SEGA Pico.
So, when Ganofsky started dreaming up his idea for playable brick cars and minifig drivers, he did so without any of the experience, or releases, that would hit in the coming years.
Ganofsky believed in the idea so strongly that he finagled a phone call with the LEGO Group and gave the company an elevator pitch for his idea. It went so well that High Voltage Software was invited out to LEGO headquarters in Billund, Denmark where they pitched the idea directly to the LEGO Group. He arrived with an early demo of a character creation tool and another showing a car made of LEGO bricks rotating in 3D.
Shortly after that pitch, the LEGO Group traveled to High Voltage Software’s Illinois studio to dive a bit deeper into the idea. Despite not yet having a deal confirmed, the studio had already started prototyping not just digitally, but also with physical creations.
“I think a lot of a lot of how we were able to get that gig was we really just were persistent and passionate, and we didn’t know any better,” said Eric Nofsinger, chief creative officer at High Voltage. “We just had this idea that we were really excited about.”
The studio was so excited that, to prepare for the LEGO Group visit, they built giant vignettes of the game featuring brick and clay models of the race tracks.
“I mean, these were massive things” Nofsinger said. “Our office had been taken over with LEGO bricks. It was just a big playground for us.”
And it worked. The LEGO Group signed a deal with High Voltage by 1997, kicking off what turned into three years of game development.
The development was difficult for several reasons, including working to capture the look and feel of the LEGO bricks in a format that wasn’t too large for video game consoles to run. While the LEGO Group’s SPU Darwin research group sent over digitized assets to the studio, they were so large that typical computers struggled to display a single brick.
The studio’s biggest challenge, though, was creating a system from scratch that could mimic the feel of snapping digital LEGO bricks together in a 3D environment that wouldn’t be too complex for children to use.
Ultimately, it took High Voltage a year to nail the look and feel of the game’s building system. The studio’s approach allowed as much freedom as possible to build with a variety of bricks.
“There was a lot of nuance to how we did this and the iterations we went through,” Nofsinger said. “It took a good year to build that system because it involved having the ability to build this stuff and then have it welded together into real-time assets that then could be optimized and then generate levels of detail.”
A breakthrough in nailing the feel of building came when lead programmer Dwight Luetscher reverse engineered a formula that would essentially filter what a player could and couldn’t do, thereby ensuring that they wouldn’t break the game.
This was important because the physical design of the cars impacted things like center of mass and physics when they hit the track.
To ensure that the game could handle these complex creations, LEGO Racers producer Keith Morton said they decided to turn the vehicles made of multiple pieces into a single piece in the background, once it was time to race.
The team also had to figure out how to animate the LEGO minifigures in a way that both looked good in a game, but also didn’t violate the LEGO Group’s brand rules. While LEGO Island was in development already by another studio, no game had featured animated, playable minifigures.
“When a character moves, can we move the arms and bend them at the elbow? Or can we not do that, because that’s not what the LEGO Group does?” Morton said. “We went through that whole process and what we got, in the end, [was that] we were able to move the legs, bending them at the knees, arms bending at the elbows, and actually it really helped.”
Around the time High Voltage was working through the look and movement of LEGO minifigs in their game, another LEGO game hit the scene, and it also featured racing, to the surprise of High Voltage.
“It made us nervous,” Morton said. “It definitely made us nervous. One of the things that we kind of talked about over the course of a couple days after we found this out: Was is this really a conflict? Or is it not? And the reality is that our game is a different experience than LEGO Island. So what we decided to do was just, like, not freak out. Let’s not change any of the design. We’ve got something very solid and fun here, right now. Let’s keep going. And that’s what we did. So we kind of stuck to our guns on that. And I think that that was the right choice.”
One of the big standout features of LEGO Racers was that it was – like Mario Kart and Diddy Kong Racing – a kart racer. That meant a specific sort of design aesthetic, simplified driving mechanics, over-the-top tracks, and, of course, power-ups.
To give the game’s power-ups a LEGO brick feel, the designers created a system that involved picking up colored brick power-ups and then finding extra bricks to stack on top of them and modify what they do.
The way stacking worked was that a player would grab a colored power-up. Then they could pick up white bricks to stack on top of it, and that would change what the power-up did. So, for instance, a red brick would give the player’s car the ability to shoot a cannonball. Stacking one white brick on top of that turned it into the grappling hook. Stacking one more turned it into a lightning wand, and a third white brick gave the car three guided rockets.
After roughly three years of development, LEGO Racers launched for Windows PC, Nintendo 64, and the original PlayStation throughout the second half of 1999. (It also technically hit the Game Boy Color in 2000, but that was a significantly different game, developed by another studio.)
The main game was fairly well received when it came out, though some people were unhappy with the lack of multiplayer options. Keith Morton said the decision was made early on to just offer one form of split-screen play that allowed two people to race against one another. They hoped that it would encourage family and friends to sit on a couch and play side-by-side.
The LEGO Group was so happy with the game that they showed off a special arcade-version of the game at the LEGOLAND Windsor resort.
Today, more than 20 years since its release, many fans of video games and LEGO toys still fondly recall playing LEGO Racers. Keith Morton has his own theory about why the game remains such a popular LEGO title.
“I think there’s two really big reasons for that,” he said. “I think everybody, regardless of their interest in LEGO bricks and building and stuff, they know what it is. It’s interesting, and you can customize it to make it your own. And that’s really the LEGO brand. The other part of it is the game itself. When you play it, especially in the beginning, it is really easy to get into. You can see the different personalities that you’re racing, and it kind of sucks you in.”
And Eric Nofsinger said that the studio still hears from LEGO Racers fans about the game.
“It’s been over 20 years since we shipped it and, to this day, both Kerry Ganofsky and myself receive regular – I would say at least multiple times a week – emails from fans saying how much this game impacted their childhood.
“It’s humbling to think that we had that kind of impression on so many people, and that so many people still recall the game fondly, and put in so many hours of their lives being entertained. I’ve worked on more than 100 games, and I can say that one of my proudest accomplishments is being a part of the LEGO Group’s history, being part of this universe, making something special that touched so many people.”
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.
Explore more…
In order of appearance:
LEGO Fun to Build – Brickipedia
SEGA Pico – Wikipedia
LEGO Loco – SimCity Inspired a Living LEGO Railway Video Game
High Voltage Software – Official website
LEGO Island – LEGO Island: Birth of a LEGO Video Game
SPU Darwin – Inside the LEGO Group’s Secretive Strategic Product Unit Darwin
