The LEGO video game console from another reality

October 13, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

An exploration of perhaps the LEGO Group’s most unusual creation unearths a captivating tale that includes a group of reality-questioning fanatics, the LEGO Group’s first and only (and very odd) gaming console, and a Power Rangers-like television show from the man behind multiple TV hits.

Some believe that the Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension toy line was either a byproduct of a failing LEGO Group or perhaps one cause of the company’s near bankruptcy.

But back in the late ‘90s, a faction within the company was enamored with the idea of creating a new toy line that still delivered the creativity of construction, but without the tubes and studs of a LEGO brick.

The company asked a concept development team to come up with a more organic approach to building without LEGO bricks. Project Genesis, as it was known in the beginning, was more like action figures and toy animals than a construction set.

The design was meant to expand the idea of building beyond the brick, specifically more organic things. Some of those early concepts included creatures that could be built by interchanging plastic body parts.

The building approach found in those creations, called LEGO Beings, was married to the idea of creating a new line of LEGO action figures, and that turned into LEGO Galidor.

Niels Milan Pedersen, who has now been a designer at the LEGO Group for more than 40 years, was one of the core team of designers assigned to the project when it first started to take shape.

“At this point in the LEGO Group’s history, some were worried that the normal LEGO brick might be a little out of fashion,” he said. “It sounds odd to say that now, but that was the feeling in those days: that it might be a little too old fashioned.”

While Pedersen and the rest of the designers were working on the physical models that would become the first wave of Galidor toys, the LEGO Group had another interesting idea up its sleeve. Not content with simply rolling out its own take on an action figure tied to a television show and video game, the company wanted to include some cutting-edge tech in the toys as well.

The Kek Powerizer had arms and legs that could be popped out and replaced and even came with two heads. But, unlike the other figures, it had an LCD screen built into its back.

It was essentially a mini LEGO game console with an LCD about the size of a Nintendo Switch game card that came pre-loaded with 22 games.

While there are three buttons beneath the screen, the games were all actually played by tilting the entire figure in different directions and rotating his arms and legs.

The figure also had a speaker and microphone built into it, which allowed it to receive hidden audio signals from the television show and video games, which would either trigger sounds from the figure, or could even be used to load or activate games.

Lau Kierstein, who was brought in to help design the toy, said that the team wanted gameplay that was different than what you’d find on a traditional console or handheld.

“It was important for us that it was a part of the play and not something you did on the side, like you could do with a Game Boy or something similar,” he said. “And that’s why we embedded all these different types of sensors, so it became an integrated play experience, and not something you did separately.”

While designers and engineers were hard at work on the toys for the upcoming launch of Galidor, the LEGO Group needed something that would bring everything together – an overarching story that would breathe life into the toys, the video games, and drive what they hoped would be a massive new original television show.

That’s where they turned to Tom Lynch, whose career in the world of tween shows was blossoming in early 2000. His history included Night Tracks, Kids Incorporated, and Caitlin’s Way.

Lynch said the LEGO Group came to him asking for a show that would work with the toy line they were creating.

When Lynch brought the concept back to the Lego Group, they loved it and put Tom’s group in touch with the character designers for the Galidor toy line.

The world that grew out of that collaboration was built around this concept of two teens, Nick Bluetooth and Allegra Zane, traveling to another dimension in a spacecraft nicknamed the Egg, to do battle with Gorm and his evil sidekicks. The two are aided by a robot named Jens, an anthropomorphic frog named Euripides, and a small bespectacled furry blue warrior named Nepol. Importantly, while Allegra uses her exceptional karate to take on the bad guys, Nick has the ability to glinch, which basically transforms his human arms or legs for the limbs of aliens or machines and uses their abilities against them.

It was an original and fascinating idea that seemed to fit in well with the zeitgeist of the moment, one influenced heavily by shows like Legends of the Hidden Temple, The Secret World of Alex Mack, and Power Rangers.

Production on the show started in early 2000, with Tom, the cast, and the crew shooting all 26 episodes for the first two seasons. The plan was to launch the half-hour episodes starting Feb. 9, 2002 on YTV in Canada and Fox Kids in the United States.

As production began on that first wave of 15 or so toys, Lynch was deep into the production on the first two TV seasons, and the LEGO Group started looking at other ways to market the new property.

One of the ideas the company had was to create a website for Galidor before it was officially revealed. Instead of promoting the show or toys, though, the website was designed to be a sort of game in itself.

Gabriel Walsh was brought on as the producer for the interactive experience that the team dreamed up. The idea was to turn the website into a sort of hunting ground for clues. People arriving at the site would feel like they had dropped into the world of Galidor, blurring – in a way – the line between fiction and fact.

At the time, the approach was a new form of marketing tied to something known as alternate reality games, or ARGs.

After the ARG went live, Walsh was researching how well his creation was received online by looking through links to the Galidor site from external websites, when he traipsed into what he calls a “very strange experience.”

“One of the final mentions of the site was a link from a very strange message board,” he said. “They had many, many threads about how phase three had begun and that they were getting ready to begin their travel into the alternate dimension. And that somehow, that all this stuff was not as fake as I thought it was.”

Unwittingly, Walsh had stumbled from a LEGO Group-sanctioned alternate reality game, to one of the world’s first ARGs ever created: Ong’s Hat.

Ong’s Hat was created in the late ‘80s as a living art project, one that was designed to play loose with the lines between its fictional narrative and reality. In the story of Ong’s Hat, a group of scientists in Ong’s Hat, New Jersey are experimenting with ways to travel to another dimension.

As the fiction grew, some fans of the literature and website began to believe that the fantasy was reality and then started to harass its creator – who posed as a researcher into the fiction.

The creator, Joseph Matheny, had to eventually pull the plug on his creation after these overzealous fans began to show up at his house, and he started to worry that they may become dangerous.

But ironically, Matheny’s revelation that the whole thing was a work of fiction was something that the Ong’s Hat true believers didn’t believe. It was, for some of them, a very real series of events, and there was a way to travel to other dimensions using a vehicle called the Egg.

Enter Galidor.

Around when Matheny was working to convince everyone that Ong’s Hat wasn’t a big conspiracy about transdimensional travel, the Galidor website popped up telling a story about a doctor traveling to another dimension in a device called the Egg.

And the LEGO Group’s Walsh decided to use the very vehicle that had given life to Ong’s Hat to create his own shadowy world tied to strikingly similar fiction.

It caused a lot of confusion for a lot of people and almost resulted in a lawsuit.

Not long after contacting the folks at Ong’s Hat, Walsh caught word that there was a threatened lawsuit in the works against the creators of Galidor, by the creator of Ong’s Hat.

Matheny said he contacted the LEGO Group about the similarities between his work and the show. It turns out that, years before, he shopped the story around to a number of producers and networks as a potential kid’s show, but no one seemed interested. But then Galidor popped up. Both, Matheny noted, have a central figure from New Jersey named Nick, both involve transdimensional travel, and both have a vehicle called the Egg.

Matheny said he thinks that the idea from his show somehow found its way into Galidor, and so he reached out to point that out. He declined to say what happened, but he said he never filed the lawsuit.

Ironically, Matheny’s goal was to embed his fiction into culture in a way that would make it hard to extract his storytelling from what did and didn’t happen – to essentially create something that felt like folklore, something that had been around forever and belonged to no one.

Lynch, for his part, said he never heard about the threatened lawsuit, but that shows are often sued by people who believe their ideas were swiped.

As all of this was happening, though, the television show, the toys, and the video games were all marching steadfastly toward a February 2002 launch.

Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension was meant to be a technical marvel, a live-action show empowered by deft costuming, over-the-top practical effects, CGI, and green-screening, all enriched by subtle audio technology that brought toys to life in the homes of the children watching.

But that’s not exactly what happened.

When the toy designers and video game developers saw the first couple of episodes before it aired, they were thoroughly unimpressed.

Pedersen said the LEGO Group designers were disappointed because the show seemed to feature actors in rubber suits. Nick Ferguson, who worked on the PC version of the Galidor game, said the developers wondered if the effects still needed to be finalized.

Meanwhile, show creator Lynch was getting a different sort of bad news.

The channel on which Galidor was going to run was sold, and the new owners didn’t seem as invested in promoting the soon-to-run show.

When it did hit, some of the reviews were lackluster at best, and soon the show started getting moved around in the programming schedule – a very bad sign.

Lynch planned to return and shoot the next seasons after a break. Instead, after the final episode of the second season aired in August 2002, everything came to a halt.

The toy line was meant to have a game developed by Tiertex Design Studios for the Game Boy Advance, and then another game for Windows PC, PlayStation 2, and GameCube developed by Asylum Entertainment. Both were to be published by Electronic Arts.

The GBA game hit in 2002, but the Asylum-developed version never launched. Well, not really.

Ferguson joined the team working on the game as the producer a bit after the studio landed the project. He said the team knew they wanted to create a fast, action-packed platformer that would incorporate some of the special abilities tied to the Kek Powerizer.

The GBA had a mixed critical reception. Asylum’s game was initially scheduled for a release in early 2003, but it was pushed back to a September 2003 release at the E3 video game expo that year.

Ferguson traveled to E3, not to promote the in-development game, which would have been typical, but to meet with folks about future project for Asylum after Galidor.

Just before the show started, Ferguson swung by a LEGO toy store and was surprised to find all of the Galidor toys deeply discounted, seemingly on clearance.

“There was literally a big bargain bin, and it was filled with Galidor merchandise,” he said. “I think that was the point for me personally, where I thought, ‘Yeah, this isn’t good’ because we were still wrapping up the game at that point.”

The team was in the final stages of localization for other regions and quality assurance. There had been already a sense that Galidor wasn’t the success everyone expected it would be and that they just needed to get the game done. Still, walking into that LEGO store happy, if not enthused, to be wrapping up a LEGO game and seeing the deep discounts was like being kicked when you were already down, Ferguson said.

About two months later, the game was canceled. To this day, Ferguson doesn’t know exactly why, though he can guess. He said the team was called into a meeting and told that the game was shuttered and that everyone was laid off.

But to seemingly everyone’s surprise, the game – never actually completed by the developer – still found its way onto store shelves, published by Focus Multimedia and ValuSoft in Europe and North America.

Galidor wasn’t just a flop. It’s a toy line that received an enormous amount of blame for things that went wrong at the LEGO Group. Business experts, fans, and even some LEGO Group employees have listed Galidor as one of, if not the worst creation of the company in its long and storied history.

Some have even said it contributed to the problems that almost bankrupted the company. One LEGO designer called Galidor the worst product to come out of the LEGO Group’s shaky ‘90s and early 2000s.

The well-regarded book Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry called Galidor an expensive, abysmal failure that made the mistake of competing against another LEGO Group product: BIONICLE®.

But time has been much more kind to Galidor. Today there are many fans of the odd mix-and-match action figures, including not a few LEGO Group designers.

Speaking with those directly connected to the project, no one sees it as the abysmal failure described in Brick by Brick.

“I still get a little offended by that,” Pedersen said. “The product was OK. Actually, here in the development department, we have quite a few people who are still very big-time fans of Galidor figures. It’s quite a lot fun.

“You will always be told this was a failure. But I’m still not ashamed to say I worked with Galidor. It’s OK for me to admit that.”

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.