SimCity Inspired a Living LEGO Railway Video Game

June 9, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

Birds chirp, cars beep, a plane soars by toting a sign. A train huffs and chugs along tracks that cut over roads and through tiny towns bustling with activity. More SimCity than LEGO Star Wars™, the world of LEGO Loco was an anomaly even for its time.

The 1998 game, created by developer Intelligent Games, came at a time when the LEGO Group and its LEGO Media International division found themselves with their first hit video game, LEGO Island, but still unsure of what exactly it meant to be a LEGO video game.

“LEGO Media was set up to take a strategic look at video games,” Rob Smith, executive producer at LMI from 1996 to 1999, told the LEGO Bits N’ Bricks podcast. “I think the LEGO Group probably had concerns that gaming was potentially cannibalistic to the core toy business.

“The purpose was to sort of help the LEGO Group understand the right steps to make a game and the right genre, the right IP to look at, and the right gaming environments to go for.”

To achieve this, LMI essentially performed an open casting call for developers, letting potential studios know that LMI was looking for pitches using LEGO bricks and theme sets.

To sort through the growing list of pitches they were getting, London-based LEGO Media International worked closely with folks at the LEGO Group back in Billund, Denmark to assemble a launch package of games that would all hit in the fall of 1998.

The result was three games: LEGO Creator by developer Superscape, LEGO Chess by Krisalis Software, and LEGO Loco by Intelligent Games.

LEGO Loco was born of a notion to create a digital toy that would live on your computer’s desktop. That idea came after the studio worked with Will Wright and Maxis – the studio behind SimCity, Sim Ant, and the like – on a title called SimIsle: Missions in the Rainforest.

“For a period of time, the studio was really fascinated by what you might call little computer people,” said Kevin Shrapnell, who was director of development at Intelligent Games. “This idea that something is alive in there, and it has its own will and its own freedoms and it puts demands on you. And that was really interesting.”

The studio discussed ideas like growing a plant on your desktop, or building gardens. They even became enamored with the idea of a little digital S&M pal.

“It’s the little computer person idea that just stuck with us.” Shrapnell said. “And you push things to the edge. You think, ‘Well, OK, what would be ridiculous? Like what would be like everybody would talk about?’ And you go, ‘Well, look, if this was like your little pet, literally your little pet slave, your S&M slave?’ It would be hilarious – totally inappropriate, but it would be done in this pixel art style. I mean, we’re not talking about anything really graphic. We talked about it having other themes to try and make it more appropriate. Just the topic is not really going to going to fly, but it stuck with us because, you know, it’s sticky. It sticks with you.”

When Intelligent Games added the LEGO Group and its many theme sets to their concept, that shifted the company’s thinking to a much more specific and palatable set of ideas. They still wanted to create a digital toy, but now with LEGO bricks.

That eventually led to the idea of creating a little train set that would live on your PC desktop, an idea that Smith and the group at LMI loved.

Once the game was greenlit, it quickly started to evolve. First, changed from a desktop widget to a program that would run in its own window. Then it expanded to include more than just the train, said Suzanne “Maddi” Maddison, who was one of the programmers on the game and came up with its name.

“It started off as a train set but then actually grew into this whole world,” she said. “The train set was just one element of this toy/game. There were then minifigures. There were buildings. We had planes and birds flying overhead. And the little flowers would open up. It was quite a rich environment. There were factories – you’d get the workers that walked to the factories. We had roads. We had paths.

“It was kind of like more of a simulation game. It was a toy that you could just play. There weren’t any missions or anything. You literally just played with it.”

The studio also created many delightful little surprises for players. There were seasons, for instance, that changed the look of LEGO Loco, and if you put different buildings together, they would become a surprise third structure. There were also a lot of little jokes hidden in the animations of minifigs as they went about their digital lives.

Players started the game with a full toy box packed with LEGO brick buildings, train tracks, roads, stations, crossings, and even scenery. Once the player stops building and closes the toy box, the little world slowly comes to life with minifigures moving in, going to work, and traveling around the world of LEGO Loco. Players then create trains to run on the lines, watching the whole world unfold from a bird’s eye view. It even gave players the ability to connect the game with other computers LEGO Loco and send messages to other towns.

While LEGO Loco didn’t make a huge splash when it was released, it remains a point of pride for those who worked on it.

“It wasn’t the kind of game that was reviewed on and got on the front cover of Edge Magazine,” said Intelligent Games founder Matthew Stibbe. “There were no big aliens or Japanese cartoons and giant guns. But it’s the one that I’m the most proud of. I don’t remember whether we got good scores or reviews. It really doesn’t matter. The fact that several of my friends’ children played it and enjoyed it made me very, very happy and very proud.”

It is also one of the only games that Stibbe still, more than 20 years later, gets fan mail about.

“When I look back on LEGO Loco, I see a game that had some different ambitions,” he said. “It was trying to be fun, it was trying to be open ended, it was trying to be, you know, delightful.”

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.