The colorful, globe-trotting LEGO® brick puzzle game Life of George may have never happened if it weren’t for an Israeli defense contractor unhappy with his lot in life.
As the story goes, Ronen Horovitz co-founded EyeCue, a leading vision tech company, after his wife asked him why he was using his expertise for the tech industry and not for the greater good.
Two years later, Horovitz made a goal for himself to show off his vision technology to the top 10 toy companies in the world.
A short demo to the LEGO Group led to a meeting in 2010 between Horovitz and Paal Smith-Meyer, who worked at the LEGO Future Lab.
“I met Ronen Horvitz at a hotel in Boston where he introduced me to this new technology he had for capturing 3D objects,” Smith-Meyer said. “He developed something where he could capture 3D LEGO bricks.”
While the demo went off without a hitch, it also reminded Smith-Meyer of another take on the tech that the LEGO Group played around with a decade earlier. In that case, it was the never-launched Kidpad, which was designed to allow children to tap Duplo toys onto a pad and transfer them into a computer game.
The Kidpad’s failure, which Smith-Meyer thought had a lot to do with the inability to switch back and forth between a computer game and physical toys, made him wary of this new technology in its present form.
But he liked the concept, which was using a webcam and computer, so he challenged Horovitz to see if he could do the same thing with an iPhone.
Three months and a $20,000 investment from the LEGO Group later, and Horovitz managed to transfer the tech to an iPhone. The new demo blew Smith-Meyer away.
“It was an app that could do one thing,” he said. “So basically, you build a few bricks together in 2D, so it’s one-by bricks, and you attach them to this purple plate, and then you raise your iPhone, and as soon as the camera looked at it, it said ‘plink,’ and the object he would appear on the screen.”
For Smith-Meyer, the experience was revelatory.
“When I heard that plink, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing! Imagine what you can now do!’”
The meeting ended with Horowitz heading back to Israel, optimistic that his company’s technology could power a new LEGO brick experience. Smith-Meyer, for his part, went on his summer holiday, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the potential of the technology. He was so captivated, he ended up whipping up a concept for a game he called Brick It, which basically had players building geometric shapes with flat LEGO elements on a pad and then scanning them to get a score based on accuracy and speed.
It was a simple experience, but it was also compelling to everyone who tried it. It was such a solid idea that it was greenlit for a potential March 2011 launch, and a small team began working on turning the prototype into an experience.
A presentation to the company’s investment board reaffirmed that the experience was worth pursuing. It was even seen as a game that could potentially crack a problem the company had been struggling with: defining the role of virtual experiences in a company so focused on the physical.
Everyone involved, though, felt it was important to get Apple onboard with the concept. They all saw it not just as an opportunity for the LEGO Group, but one that could underscore the potential of the iPhone.
The team managed to wrangle a meeting with Apple in London, where those present also liked the concept. But they felt it was missing an essential spark of creativity.
Fortunately, Cynthia Bodin, who had been brought on to the project as a designer was – at the same time the meeting was going on – worrying over the same issue.
“When I got the prototype, I thought it was kind of cold,” she said. “I started thinking that the best way to actually bring emotions to the concept was to create a character.”
Bodin tinkered around with a pile of flat bricks and eventually came up with a little flat chap, neatly dressed and smiling.
“I was trying different iterations,” Bodin said, “and when I was happy with him, I showed him to a colleague of mine, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s George,’ and that’s how George was born.”
Bodin’s decision to give Brick It a personality – to take a pile of bricks and a flat grid and turn it into the towheaded, brick-eyed George – didn’t just give the game personality and solve Apple’s challenge even before the team visiting London returned to Denmark, it also led to a nickname for Bodin: Mother of George.
Once he was created, Bodin decided to give George a bit of an everyman life and tie that to the game.
So now George, his everyday life, and his travels, became the glue that held the game’s different challenges together.
The result: a game that tasked players with recreating objects from George’s adventures using flat tiles, as quickly as possible.
To bring a bit more personality to George and his hobbies, the team created a Facebook page under the name I Love Numbers because, according to Smith-Meyer, George is a bit of a nerd.
Soon Bodin and the rest of the small team found themselves managing George’s Facebook page and even responding to the emails he received on his personal email account.
George’s Facebook page launched in May 2011, a bit before the Life of George did. So when the game hit in September 2011, some people were already aware of George.
Empowered by the reaction to Life of George, the team wanted to take the experience – in particular, the technology – and expand it into different game genres. Initially, that meant creating expansions for Life of George itself. The first was a sort of Japanese game show for the app where players had to spin a wheel on their phone to get new challenges.
To really dig into the potential concepts and explore new opportunities with the technology, the LEGO Group partnered with developer Funcom.
Funcom looked at the tech behind Life of George and put a pitch together about three other games. One was for a game that would have players creating flat fish designs which could be scanned and then brought to life in a fish tank on your phone. Another was called LEGO Elements, and was essentially Minecraft designed for a tablet, but with the addition of the ability to scan flat buildings and extrude them into the 3D world of the game on your device. The third was a town planner that melded the idea of constructing building facades to scan into a virtual city with the planning elements of a game like SimCity.
The team then prioritized the three projects and set to work on fleshing them out for the LEGO Group.
“We got shipped six massive boxes of LEGO bricks of all the different kinds of sets they had because they wanted that immersion so that we could really get into that creative thinking,” said Matthew Zoern, the executive producer at Funcom Canada at the time. “We started breaking up the project – figuring out what the core game loop was and how we were going to engage users.”
As the projects took form, the team was sure all three would become games. Fish Tank, though, was the top priority because everyone on the team thought it was such a strong idea. The team spent months on research and development, trying to work through some of the problems created by scanning a physical 2D model and exporting it into a digital 3D environment.
The team was also finding great success with their work on Elements, achieving the sort of technical outcome that even surprised the higher-ups at the LEGO Group, Zoern said.
But one, by one, the projects started to fall through, starting with Fish Tank, which was ultimately shuttered for not being cool enough.
Next came the death of Town Planner and Elements and, not too much later, the shuttering of Funcom’s Canada office. Zoern said it all happened seemingly out of the blue. The prototypes were either mothballed or transferred over to TT Games, which was thick in the midst of building popular LEGO adventure titles.
While Funcom was working to expand the ideas behind the technology that drove Life of George, the LEGO Group’s Future Lab continued their support of the game, essentially maintaining it. And when the work Funcom was doing transferred over to TT Games, most of the Future Lab folks began working with them on Fusion, the next big project using the technology.
LEGO Fusion, which was released in 2014, seems to blend elements of two of Funcom’s early prototypes to deliver an experience that has players building out facades that can then be imported into a LEGO city on a tablet.
But the birth of Fusion brought with it the death of George.
Another Funcom project that saw new life – but not as a published game – was Fish Tank. It was resurrected and redesigned to become a key interactive exhibit at the LEGO House in Denmark.
Life of George was more than just a fun-loving, globe-trotting everyman who urged people to play with small piles of bricks. He was also a pivotal moment in the world of LEGO Games, in particular the LEGO Group’s exploration of fluidly moving between the physical and digital in play.
Smith-Meyer, who was so inspired during that first meeting back in 2009, thinks that in some ways, the biggest lesson to glean from Life of George has nothing to do with the technology that empowered it.
“For me,” he said, “it was a reminder about how creative you can be with a few bricks.”
Explore more…
In order of appearance:
LEGO Kidpad – How the LEGO Group Blends the Physical and Digital to Create New Forms of Play
Life of George – YouTube
EyeCue – Official website
Funcom – Official website
Fish Designer – Official website
The LEGO House – Official website
LEGO Fusion – Brickipedia