The Rise and Fall of LEGO Universe: Inception

February 17, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

The LEGO Group’s biggest single investment in a video game cost more than $125 million and involved more than 450 contributors and “stakeholders” over the course of its roughly five-year development but was shut down less than two years after going live.

Despite that, the LEGO Group said in a recent episode of the Bits’ N Bricks podcast that, in retrospect, LEGO® Universe was in many ways a tremendous success.

The game’s prolonged development brought with it a number of important insights into a vast array of complex ideas, including how the company could leverage its brand to create its first online game, the talent, infrastructure, and business systems required to run such an effort, the importance and cost of creating and maintaining robust child safety systems, and – perhaps most importantly – the need to follow one of the key rules of game development: nail it before you scale it.

While pre-production on the massively multiplayer online game started officially in early 2006, the gestation of the game’s core conceits started bubbling up at the LEGO Group as early as 2002, years before even the start of the company’s incredibly successful relationship with developer TT Games and its run of popular LEGO titles.

A group at the company was formed in 2002 to delve into what it would take to build a space for creating, sharing, and playing online. The concept, dubbed “Project Arena,” was inspired by the rise of MMOs and a desire to decipher how children would be playing in the future.

The initial offshoot of that research led to the design of LEGO Digital Designer, a program that digitized bricks so that people could build their own LEGO structures on a computer. An internal roadmap for the evolution of LEGO Digital Designer, which came out in 2004, included several possible future concepts, one of which was called “virtual world.”

By the end of 2004, a group of eight or so people within the LEGO Group started researching whether it made sense for the company to develop its own massively multiplayer online game, whether it was possible, and how much it would cost. Among the group were Ronny Scherer, who would later become the director overseeing development on LEGO Universe, and Mark Hansen, who would later become the game’s senior director.

“The first time I heard about the LEGO Universe idea, I was excited by some of the people like Ronny Scherer and Mark William Hansen, because they talked so much about the possibilities of creating this fantastic LEGO game where you would basically move the play from the child’s room in the physical world and to the virtual world, and to be able to create and play just like children do in the children’s room,” said Lisbeth Valther, who was the executive vice president at the LEGO Group at the time. “I was excited to see it because we had had quite a lot of success with some video games, but to me, the video games were more like a play theme that had been moved into the virtual world. What I was excited about was this whole idea about building a LEGO online community that could sort of expand and evolve according to what the children really wanted in this world.”

In October 2005, the LEGO Group – encouraged by LEGO Star Wars’ surprise success: The Video Game and the company’s general positive financial outlook – gave tacit approval for the project, kicking off a year-long search for a developer.

That search started with a simple email to about 80 developers asking if they’d like to create a LEGO online game and evolved into in-person studio visits to about 50 of them by Hansen and his team.

“We got replies from 50 developers and everyone who replied, we went out and saw and did some discussion with them,” Hansen said. “Just from that, we probably used seven, eight months, and two to six people involved at any one time talking to all the developers. In that discussion with those studios, that number dwindled to about 12, and then it came down to their creativity.”

Those dozen were soon whittled down to just four candidates, among them Funcom and NetDevil.

Ultimately, NetDevil’s camaraderie, experience, and sheer excitement about the project won them the contract in early 2006.

The timing couldn’t have been better for the studio, which was located in Colorado, between Boulder and Denver. Formed in 1997 by a group of friends, the company’s initial success with multiplayer online space game Jumpgate led to a contract with South Korean developer and publisher NCSoft to create a massively multiplayer online car combat game called Auto Assault.

By late 2005, the NetDevil team was wrapping up Auto Assault, and the founders began to ponder what they wanted to do next. They knew they wanted to work on another massively multiplayer online game but hoped to do so with an existing intellectual property instead of building one from scratch as they had with all of their other games.

That’s when the email arrived.

“The email was just a pretty simple one-liner: would you be interested in working in an online LEGO world project?” said Ryan Seabury, who would become LEGO Universe’s creative director. NetDevil co-founder and president “Scott Brown got it and forwarded it to [co-founder and studio art director] Peter Grundy and myself. When I saw it come across my desk and I was sitting there tired, hadn’t gotten any sleep in, you know, months, and I saw that come across and I just kind of pushed back from my desk and was like, this could be like the greatest MMO of all time. And, uh, so I immediately ran over to Scott’s office and was like, ‘We’ve gotta do this, man. This is awesome.'”

With a contract signed for the project, code-named LEGO Worlds Online, a group of three or four people from the studio began early work on basic design questions, technical limitations, and high-level game design ideas.

In June 2007, the LEGO Group officially announced LEGO Universe as a massively multiplayer online game. The press release promised that the game would include character advancement, expansive social and community features, and provide a child-safe alternative to other massively multiplayer online games. The company said the plan was for the game to come out in the fourth quarter of 2008.

The studio, expanding at a seemingly exponential rate, moved into a massive warehouse across from their old offices. As the team grew, the studio dove into the hard work of creating the game. The biggest initial challenge was that while the LEGO Group approached the project with a specific goal in mind, it didn’t have a clear path to getting there. Instead, they deliberately choose a developer to partner with that could help bring to life a shared vision of the LEGO Group’s initial concept of a LEGO online game.

“They didn’t know what they wanted,” Brown said. “They just knew that they have this amazing IP that is loved all over the world, and they wanted to try to build an online game out of that. That’s what made it so fun: nobody knew what it meant at the beginning. Right. And it was a lot of trial and error, you know, should it be exactly the TT games? Should it be totally different, you know? Is it a game that you’re building for their master builders, or is it a game you’re building for eight-year-olds? There were just so many questions, but it was also exciting.”

Unfortunately, the pre-production almost immediately started running into issues. At the top of the list was the massive time difference between NetDevil, located in Colorado, and the LEGO Group, located in Denmark. The LEGO Group wanted to be an active partner in the game’s early development, which led to prolonged back-and-forth discussions often hampered by that time gap.

Other major challenges included the sheer technical issue of filling a screen with high-polygon count LEGO bricks without requiring a high-end computer to run the game. Child safety, a top concern for everyone involved, was so layered into the game’s operation that it ended up costing nearly 30 percent of its entire production. And, seemingly looming over the entire project, was the blank page: there were so many possibilities that the teams at the LEGO Group and NetDevil were struggling to narrow the game down to a single vision.

The final, perhaps biggest, issue was that the team had exploded in size. What started as a 40 or so person team was now more than a hundred, and monthly payroll was hovering around $800,000.

“You can imagine with three owners who are so heads-down on what the product is; we were not looking at a higher level from a company standpoint,” Grundy said. “We didn’t have the CFO clout that someone like an EA did. They were really looking into the future. And financially, the three of us were responsible for everyone’s payroll. That sounds crazy, right? Three people’s houses could not support the payroll if the LEGO Group decided not to pay. The capital on three houses couldn’t support one month’s payroll. So that’s why as owners, we were like, ‘We’ve got to do something here. We’ve got to get investment. We’ve got to restructure the company.’ That’s when offers and people started coming in about selling the company.”

Like many video game contracts, NetDevil’s with the LEGO Group required the company to hit certain milestones by certain dates to get paid. As the work and problems grew, the things that had to be accomplished for each milestone grew, and soon the studio was crunching – working long, desperate hours – more and more. That crunch, Brown now says, was one of his biggest regrets.

Then, with pressure building, stress building, everyone working long, hard hours, the unthinkable nearly happened.

And it started with a letter.

“The LEGO Group sent us a letter that we were in breach of our contract by not staying up to speed on deliverables, which surprised us because we sort of felt like there was never a decision we made alone,” Brown said. “I think they saw it as a way to pressure us into maybe delivering faster where we felt like the speed was not relative to our skills or our motivation. That added immensely to the financial pressure.”

In retrospect, Scherer said the decision to send the letter was not very nice, but that it was one of the only levers the company had to try and right development that seemed adrift.

That letter was the chief impetus for NetDevil to sell to Gazillion.

Gazillion was founded by venture capitalist Rob Hutter, investor Bhavin Shah, and Doom creator John Romero in 2005 to develop and publish online games. It had already managed to snatch up rights for Marvel and raise more than $250 million over time. NetDevil hoped a mix of the Gazillion founder pedigree and money would help stabilize their finances and provide the sort of support the company needed to continue work on LEGO Universe.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.

It was the summer of 2008, now nearly two years into development, and under this new ownership, the NetDevil team continued to work on a key problem: They still weren’t entirely sure what the game was meant to be.

The second part of Bits’ N Bricks two-part examination of LEGO Universe dives deep into the game’s last four years. It was a tumultuous time in which Gazillion would prove to be a disastrous partner for NetDevil and the LEGO Group, NetDevil’s‘ passionate founders would leave the project and the company, and the game would finally launch and then be shut down.

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.