The First and Last LEGO Sports Game

December 1, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

LEGO video games and sports don’t seem to mix, at least not much.

In its more than 25-year history of helping to make LEGO video games, the LEGO Group has only really ever made one tied directly to a traditional sport: Football Mania.

There have been more than 150 video games made featuring the LEGO Group’s trademark bricks, minifigs, and system of play, but the 2002 game – also known as Soccer Mania – stands alone in many ways.

The LEGO Group brought on British video game developer Silicon Dreams Studio to capture the joy of football with the look of LEGO bricks, in time for the FIFA World Cup.

Silicon Dreams Studio made the cut because of its experience creating football games as well as LEGO Island 2: The Brickster’s Revenge.

“I can only assume that the LEGO Group looked at the studio’s skill set and said, ‘Well, you’re perfect for this LEGO soccer game,” said David Whitehead, lead artist on Football Mania.

Mark James, who was the lead engineer on Football Mania, said that the LEGO Group was interested in attaching a new game to a popular sub-theme of its sports theme sets.

The original concept was to create something that was playable by 8-year-olds. James said that required a lot of playtesting with that target group of children.

That led to a game that felt more like an arcade title than a simulation approach to football. As the team put the game in motion, it ran into its first big problem.

“Our first concerns were actually whether we could get the minifigs flexible enough to play football,” James said. “There’s a lot of player movement and animation that has to happen, some very tight turns. And actually, that became probably the biggest problem on the project. The LEGO Group at the time were very controlled on their ways in which you could use the minifig – the ways you could actually bend the minifig or break it in any way. So it made things like overhead kicks and tight turns very hard to do within the animation engine.”

Ultimately, the developer and the LEGO Group came to an understanding that allowed a degree of twisting.

“I think it was like a 20% of a deformation on the – there was a very accurate figure, and lots of guidelines that were really established on this,” James said. “and then went into the Traveller’s Tales games and the subsequent games for the LEGO Group.”

Despite wanting to release the game to line up with the year’s World Cup, the LEGO Group didn’t actually have the license to the FIFA World Cup, so instead, they worked on creating a football tournament built around the LEGO Group’s broader universe of theme sets.

The game’s story kicks off with a pretty traditional plot. You’re playing against six other teams to win a world cup. But after you succeed, the Brickster – the central villain from the LEGO Island games – shows up and steals the trophy. That kicks off the wild adventure across the LEGO theme sets as you play it out in a variety of strange settings trying to catch up to the Brickster, so you can challenge him and his team to a match and win back the cup.

Time started to run short as the development team breathed life into the story and created unusual stadiums based on LEGO theme sets. Then the team ran into a major problem – one that almost killed the game, according to James.

“There was a really interesting conversation about the goal net,” James said. “The LEGO Group didn’t have anything that was really a piece of string or a piece of cloth. They didn’t have anything really in the place that was like that.

“So they said, ‘This needs to be plastic.’ And we said, ‘Well, in a football game, the net needs to move. You need to see where the net moves and see when the ball hits the back.”

Eventually, the LEGO Group capitulated, but James said that the studio was close to walking away.

“That one was a really tense moment in the last couple of weeks of the project,” he said.

Ultimately, Football Mania shipped with an in-game net moved, but very rigidly. And the studio managed to get the game out just as the FIFA World Cup was wrapping up.

The Silicon Dreams Studio game hit in 2002 on PlayStation 2 and Windows PC, and a Game Boy Advance port developed by Tiertex also landed that same year.

It was one of the last few LEGO video games released prior to 2005’s LEGO Star Wars™: The Video Game, which completely changed the look and feel of all LEGO video games for more than a decade.

“We were sort of the last of the classic LEGO sets being represented in a video game, I think,” Whitehead said. “I think afterward it was Star Wars and Indiana Jones™, et cetera. So we were the end of an era.”

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.