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Oh man, Lego Island... there's a childhood memory from the 90's. I remember being super-disappointed as a kid that it wasn't a free-build type game. There was

Oh man, Lego Island... there's a childhood memory from the 90's. I remember being super-disappointed as a kid that it wasn't a free-build type game. There was building, but it was rather guided and there was a story. I wanted something more like Lego Creator but in first-person. Lego never really produced something like that but sometime in the mid-2000's someone cranked out Blockland which scratched that itch and then Minecraft came along and I was addicted to that in the early days before it became a big smash hit and was sold to Microsoft. Edit: Also the multiplayer aspects of Blockland and Minecraft put anything LEGO ever created to shame... they just couldn't grasp the online/community thing and I'm not sure they wanted to handle the moderation for it either.

josephg 5y ago
I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration. Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.
- mcphage 5y ago
  > I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste. The Lego video game series by Traveller’s Tales may be weirdly un-Lego-like, but they are also quite good. So I wouldn’t discount their taste too much.
  - EamonnMR 5y ago
    Also Templar Studios did the original Bionicle Myst-like and it was superb. https://youtube.com/watch?v=kmHmFmPM5Hk https://youtube.com/watch?v=kmHmFmPM5Hk
- bombcar 5y ago
  Minecraft itself was developed surprisingly late - there’s nothing really preventing it from happening ten years earlier.
  - mysterydip 5y ago
    While the graphics are/were crude, the sheer number of polys and the dynamics of the world and layers of drawing wasn't possible in the early 2000s. Not in first person at any rate.
    - tallies 5y ago
      Look up Ken Silverman's Voxlap engine from the early 2000s. It was most famously used for the game Ace of Spades 0.75 from 2011. It had very basic graphics and I remember even at the time it was advertised as being able to run on anything. I can imagine a game resembling Minecraft being feasible on high end machines in the early 2000s
- herbstein 5y ago
  > I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of LEGO’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste. I work as a developer @ LEGO in Denmark, but I'm speaking purely for myself here. My only knowledge is of internal software, and I assume you're speaking about consumer facing software. LEGO did do video game publishing where e.g. the LEGO Island sequels were released through. And the team at LEGO Interactive, the video game publishing arm of the company, later merged with Traveller's Tales to form TT Games that created the LEGO Star Wars games. While they weren't developed by LEGO there was a close relationship. On the more technical software side I'm personally very fond of LEGO Mindstorm and its ability to make programming more intuitive and tangible while still facilitating "playing with LEGO".
  - abraae 5y ago
    My son wants your job!
    - herbstein 5y ago
      I like my job very much, but the day-to-day is the same as in any other big corporation with all the "agile coaches" and office politics that come with it. What we also get is an amazing workplace (look up LEGO Campus) with a huge amount of tool freedom and flexibility. I've done projects in Rust for internal tooling because that's what I'm excited about right now, and one of my more TDD and CI/CD-interested colleagues is allowed to spend time really fleshing that part of his work out. And of course, when I first got the job I (as a Dane with Danish family) wasn't told "congratulations with the job". I was, however, told "congratulations with the job at LEGO" with a very big emphasis on the last at LEGO. It's a point of pride when extended family asks because it's so revered.
  - josephg 5y ago
    Oh I love mindstorms. We used it years ago as part of my CS program at university. Our assignment was to figure out how to route trains around a network in haskell (given a track layout and some goals). Some students and I worked to connect the haskell API to real trains through lego RCX bricks. It was super fun, and it (for the first time) gave me the sense that I can make anything. But mindstorms, PoweredUp, Boost and the whole lego ecosystem at the moment is a mess. The point of lego bricks is that they're inherently compatible - any brick can connect to any other brick, going back for decades. But strangely, lego's software doesn't follow this at all. Despite all running through bluetooth, Mindstorms and PoweredUp work through entirely different (and as far as I can tell, incompatible) software and protocols. Mindstorms programs (which can run on either a mindstorms brick or a PC) should be able to, through bluetooth, connect to and drive any number of mindstorms/poweredup/boost controllers and use them to connect to additional sensors and motors. Then you could use the mindstorms software to program poweredup robots, use mindstorms bricks as the brain for large robots with poweredup hubs, use train controllers as inputs into mindstorms programs, and so on. But you can't. Its all strangely siloed by "theme". Despite using the same plug, you can't even use all of the poweredup / train / mindstorms sensors and motors interchangeably with all of lego's microcontrollers. On the software side lego maintains two separate & mutually incompatible scratch style programming languages, driven through different apps, to talk to physical hardware that is fundamentally, technically deeply compatible. From any other company I would understand. But this is LEGO. The whole point of lego is that it all connects together. If you have a voice at lego, please help the software teams understand and uphold the same mandate for fundamental interconnectedness in code.
- missblit 5y ago
  There was Lego creator, though building part was 3rd person so probably closer to KidCAD than Minecraft. I actually really wanted to like that game as a kid, but either my computer wasn't beefy enough to run it, or it was a buggy crashy mess (not totally sure which).
  - EamonnMR 5y ago
    It was a buggy crashy mess. Also there wasn't much to do because there was no adversity. Sure there is also no adversity in creative mode MC but don't underestimate how important the first experience you get of having to mine your resources is in slowly introducing the game loop. Creator you just make a few cars, drive them to nowhere, spawn an army of NPCs, watch them fight, that's about it. The Knight's Kingdom version might have been better in that regard.
  - roywashere 5y ago
    I got Lego Island 2 for my kid in 2008 which was old at the time. He loved it! It had a nice story line and easy things to do for a 4 year old. When he finished it I found the original Lego Island game second hand and thinking how sequels mostly suck had high expectations. It was a disappointment. Island 2 had :just enough: free roam and 1 not as much, I guess.
- Negitivefrags 5y ago
  I don’t think someone with lego in mind could have come up with minecraft. The problem is that there really isn’t an interface for building with Lego freeform that doesn’t suck for new users. Not many people are willing to get good at something like that for purely creative reasons. Minecraft works because it’s limited to 1x1x1 bricks. The interface you can make with such a restriction is significantly better. But I don’t think anyone thinking about lego would have seen that as an acceptable trade off before minecraft.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    Minecraft of course was heavily influenced by Slaves to Armok God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. I could totally see making a Lego version of that.
- Impossible 5y ago
  There are few Lego games that actually embrace free building or engineering. I've heard it is because Lego doesn't want a digital app to cannibalize their physical sales, which always seemed silly to me.
  - dolmen 5y ago
    Nowadays there are even few LEGO physical products that actually embrace free building. Most LEGO products are directed building toward one (or a few) models. Even the yellow boxes in the Classic theme (many different bricks). Free building is just frightening to most customers.
- billfruit 5y ago
  Isn't there "Lego Worlds" game which might be similar to Minecraft.
- rendaw 5y ago
  Could it be like Warhammer where they're unable to make a decent digital game since they're worried about it cannibalizing their physical good sales?
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    My limited understanding is that the Total War take on Warhammer has been quite popular. Or are you referring to a tabletop replacement style game?
    - stnikolauswagne 5y ago
      The Total War situation is a bit of an odd one, it emulated Warhammer Fantasy Battles, which was discontinued in 2015, Total War: Warhammer came out in 2016. Whether this is a coincidence or GW intentionally not letting well-established Devs work on their active IPs is debatable however.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    There are like a hundred Warhammer 40k games now. I haven't played tabletop myself, but Sanctus Reach looks like a pretty direct copy of the rules to PC, similar to the Battletech and Blood Bowl games. https://store.steampowered.com/app/502370/Warhammer_40000_Sanctus_Reach/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/502370/Warhammer_40000_Sa...
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  > The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. The core fantasy of Google is supposed to be "collect the world's information to put it at your fingertips", when in reality it's more like "...to sell it to big advertisers". Same deal with Lego. I doubt they could transition to freeform creativity when their entire business process is oriented towards a diametrically opposite goal. (This is speaking as a person with three kids and a whole storage rack dedicated to Lego.)
- thomasedwards 5y ago
  From what I’ve read, they couldn’t work out how to make a free play game that would work online and stop people from making giant penises. https://splinternews.com/lego-universe-had-a-huge-dong-detection-problem-says-f-1793848210 https://splinternews.com/lego-universe-had-a-huge-dong-detec...
- dolmen 5y ago
  > I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste. The LEGO Bits n' Bricks podcast is very insightful about LEGO story in the digital world. https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news/2020/december/lego-games-25-anniversary https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news/2020/december/lego-g... I particularly recommend episode "A Fabled Story" which features 2 LEGO top executives. The LEGO CEO in the 90's was himself a computer programmer.
virtue3 5y ago
online interaction back then was kind of a big no no. Nintendo took a long time to implement it. Anything targeted towards children was basically not a good candidate for online collaboration because of the fear of predators. I think we have a good model now of how to do it correctly and what sort of safe guards are expected in the software to protect end users so it's less of an issue now. Minecraft also did a good job of separating public/private server (or at least it did back in the day).
op00to 5y ago
Look up LEGO Worlds. It’s almost a great building game. Fun with kids.
ajmurmann 5y ago
Well, they tried to build something like it but it turned out hard to keep people from building things that were inappropriate for kids: https://za.ign.com/lego-universe/91181/news/cancelled-lego-mmos-biggest-problem-was-a-penis-filter https://za.ign.com/lego-universe/91181/news/cancelled-lego-m...
- animal531 5y ago
  I consider that a server problem. Why make it an MMO instead of copying for example Minecraft. Let anyone host a server and then people can join what/where they want.
  - dolmen 5y ago
    LEGO wants so much to control its brand image that it doesn't want to risk to allow content inappropriate for kids. So self hosting LEGO-branded games open to the world will never happen.
tasogare 5y ago
I was disappointed at first by the lack of building too. After a while I still enjoyed it a bit for what it was; it was a fun game.
Varriount 5y ago
"Lego Creator: Harry Potter" had something like this. If there is more than one piece of software with that title, the one I'm talking about was published... early 2000's? A little bit after the first movie, at least.
_Donny 5y ago
One of my very first PC games was the Lego Racer 2. Although the racing was not as good as in the first game, it still had some interesting elements. I was completely blown away that I could build my own car and race in it. Furthermore, you could free-roam the world with your car, exploring the tracks, finding shortcuts, discovering secrets, and completing missions. I felt very disappointed that I could not build my own house, but I was still amazed by the (limited) creativity that the game provided. Funny how just a bit of freedom to create and explore in a game kicks off the fantasies in a child.
tjungblut 5y ago
I vividly remember Legoland[1] the video game, where you can manage a park and build it from the ground up. It's very similar to the rollercoaster tycoon games from back then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legoland_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legoland_(video_game)
codeulike 5y ago
There is a free-build multiplayer sandbox lego game called Lego Worlds - since 2017 Classic Space trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqTpW4wQznQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqTpW4wQznQ

josephg 5y ago

I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration. Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.

mcphage 5y ago
> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste. The Lego video game series by Traveller’s Tales may be weirdly un-Lego-like, but they are also quite good. So I wouldn’t discount their taste too much.
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  Also Templar Studios did the original Bionicle Myst-like and it was superb. https://youtube.com/watch?v=kmHmFmPM5Hk https://youtube.com/watch?v=kmHmFmPM5Hk
bombcar 5y ago
Minecraft itself was developed surprisingly late - there’s nothing really preventing it from happening ten years earlier.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  While the graphics are/were crude, the sheer number of polys and the dynamics of the world and layers of drawing wasn't possible in the early 2000s. Not in first person at any rate.
  - tallies 5y ago
    Look up Ken Silverman's Voxlap engine from the early 2000s. It was most famously used for the game Ace of Spades 0.75 from 2011. It had very basic graphics and I remember even at the time it was advertised as being able to run on anything. I can imagine a game resembling Minecraft being feasible on high end machines in the early 2000s
herbstein 5y ago
> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of LEGO’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste. I work as a developer @ LEGO in Denmark, but I'm speaking purely for myself here. My only knowledge is of internal software, and I assume you're speaking about consumer facing software. LEGO did do video game publishing where e.g. the LEGO Island sequels were released through. And the team at LEGO Interactive, the video game publishing arm of the company, later merged with Traveller's Tales to form TT Games that created the LEGO Star Wars games. While they weren't developed by LEGO there was a close relationship. On the more technical software side I'm personally very fond of LEGO Mindstorm and its ability to make programming more intuitive and tangible while still facilitating "playing with LEGO".
- abraae 5y ago
  My son wants your job!
  - herbstein 5y ago
    I like my job very much, but the day-to-day is the same as in any other big corporation with all the "agile coaches" and office politics that come with it. What we also get is an amazing workplace (look up LEGO Campus) with a huge amount of tool freedom and flexibility. I've done projects in Rust for internal tooling because that's what I'm excited about right now, and one of my more TDD and CI/CD-interested colleagues is allowed to spend time really fleshing that part of his work out. And of course, when I first got the job I (as a Dane with Danish family) wasn't told "congratulations with the job". I was, however, told "congratulations with the job at LEGO" with a very big emphasis on the last at LEGO. It's a point of pride when extended family asks because it's so revered.
- josephg 5y ago
  Oh I love mindstorms. We used it years ago as part of my CS program at university. Our assignment was to figure out how to route trains around a network in haskell (given a track layout and some goals). Some students and I worked to connect the haskell API to real trains through lego RCX bricks. It was super fun, and it (for the first time) gave me the sense that I can make anything. But mindstorms, PoweredUp, Boost and the whole lego ecosystem at the moment is a mess. The point of lego bricks is that they're inherently compatible - any brick can connect to any other brick, going back for decades. But strangely, lego's software doesn't follow this at all. Despite all running through bluetooth, Mindstorms and PoweredUp work through entirely different (and as far as I can tell, incompatible) software and protocols. Mindstorms programs (which can run on either a mindstorms brick or a PC) should be able to, through bluetooth, connect to and drive any number of mindstorms/poweredup/boost controllers and use them to connect to additional sensors and motors. Then you could use the mindstorms software to program poweredup robots, use mindstorms bricks as the brain for large robots with poweredup hubs, use train controllers as inputs into mindstorms programs, and so on. But you can't. Its all strangely siloed by "theme". Despite using the same plug, you can't even use all of the poweredup / train / mindstorms sensors and motors interchangeably with all of lego's microcontrollers. On the software side lego maintains two separate & mutually incompatible scratch style programming languages, driven through different apps, to talk to physical hardware that is fundamentally, technically deeply compatible. From any other company I would understand. But this is LEGO. The whole point of lego is that it all connects together. If you have a voice at lego, please help the software teams understand and uphold the same mandate for fundamental interconnectedness in code.
missblit 5y ago
There was Lego creator, though building part was 3rd person so probably closer to KidCAD than Minecraft. I actually really wanted to like that game as a kid, but either my computer wasn't beefy enough to run it, or it was a buggy crashy mess (not totally sure which).
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  It was a buggy crashy mess. Also there wasn't much to do because there was no adversity. Sure there is also no adversity in creative mode MC but don't underestimate how important the first experience you get of having to mine your resources is in slowly introducing the game loop. Creator you just make a few cars, drive them to nowhere, spawn an army of NPCs, watch them fight, that's about it. The Knight's Kingdom version might have been better in that regard.
- roywashere 5y ago
  I got Lego Island 2 for my kid in 2008 which was old at the time. He loved it! It had a nice story line and easy things to do for a 4 year old. When he finished it I found the original Lego Island game second hand and thinking how sequels mostly suck had high expectations. It was a disappointment. Island 2 had :just enough: free roam and 1 not as much, I guess.
Negitivefrags 5y ago
I don’t think someone with lego in mind could have come up with minecraft. The problem is that there really isn’t an interface for building with Lego freeform that doesn’t suck for new users. Not many people are willing to get good at something like that for purely creative reasons. Minecraft works because it’s limited to 1x1x1 bricks. The interface you can make with such a restriction is significantly better. But I don’t think anyone thinking about lego would have seen that as an acceptable trade off before minecraft.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Minecraft of course was heavily influenced by Slaves to Armok God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. I could totally see making a Lego version of that.
Impossible 5y ago
There are few Lego games that actually embrace free building or engineering. I've heard it is because Lego doesn't want a digital app to cannibalize their physical sales, which always seemed silly to me.
- dolmen 5y ago
  Nowadays there are even few LEGO physical products that actually embrace free building. Most LEGO products are directed building toward one (or a few) models. Even the yellow boxes in the Classic theme (many different bricks). Free building is just frightening to most customers.
billfruit 5y ago
Isn't there "Lego Worlds" game which might be similar to Minecraft.
rendaw 5y ago
Could it be like Warhammer where they're unable to make a decent digital game since they're worried about it cannibalizing their physical good sales?
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  My limited understanding is that the Total War take on Warhammer has been quite popular. Or are you referring to a tabletop replacement style game?
  - stnikolauswagne 5y ago
    The Total War situation is a bit of an odd one, it emulated Warhammer Fantasy Battles, which was discontinued in 2015, Total War: Warhammer came out in 2016. Whether this is a coincidence or GW intentionally not letting well-established Devs work on their active IPs is debatable however.
- thrower123 5y ago
  There are like a hundred Warhammer 40k games now. I haven't played tabletop myself, but Sanctus Reach looks like a pretty direct copy of the rules to PC, similar to the Battletech and Blood Bowl games. https://store.steampowered.com/app/502370/Warhammer_40000_Sanctus_Reach/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/502370/Warhammer_40000_Sa...
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
> The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. The core fantasy of Google is supposed to be "collect the world's information to put it at your fingertips", when in reality it's more like "...to sell it to big advertisers". Same deal with Lego. I doubt they could transition to freeform creativity when their entire business process is oriented towards a diametrically opposite goal. (This is speaking as a person with three kids and a whole storage rack dedicated to Lego.)
thomasedwards 5y ago
From what I’ve read, they couldn’t work out how to make a free play game that would work online and stop people from making giant penises. https://splinternews.com/lego-universe-had-a-huge-dong-detection-problem-says-f-1793848210 https://splinternews.com/lego-universe-had-a-huge-dong-detec...
dolmen 5y ago
> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste. The LEGO Bits n' Bricks podcast is very insightful about LEGO story in the digital world. https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news/2020/december/lego-games-25-anniversary https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news/2020/december/lego-g... I particularly recommend episode "A Fabled Story" which features 2 LEGO top executives. The LEGO CEO in the 90's was himself a computer programmer.

virtue3 5y ago

online interaction back then was kind of a big no no. Nintendo took a long time to implement it. Anything targeted towards children was basically not a good candidate for online collaboration because of the fear of predators. I think we have a good model now of how to do it correctly and what sort of safe guards are expected in the software to protect end users so it's less of an issue now. Minecraft also did a good job of separating public/private server (or at least it did back in the day).

op00to 5y ago

Look up LEGO Worlds. It’s almost a great building game. Fun with kids.

ajmurmann 5y ago

Well, they tried to build something like it but it turned out hard to keep people from building things that were inappropriate for kids: https://za.ign.com/lego-universe/91181/news/cancelled-lego-mmos-biggest-problem-was-a-penis-filter https://za.ign.com/lego-universe/91181/news/cancelled-lego-m...

animal531 5y ago
I consider that a server problem. Why make it an MMO instead of copying for example Minecraft. Let anyone host a server and then people can join what/where they want.
- dolmen 5y ago
  LEGO wants so much to control its brand image that it doesn't want to risk to allow content inappropriate for kids. So self hosting LEGO-branded games open to the world will never happen.

tasogare 5y ago

I was disappointed at first by the lack of building too. After a while I still enjoyed it a bit for what it was; it was a fun game.

Varriount 5y ago

"Lego Creator: Harry Potter" had something like this. If there is more than one piece of software with that title, the one I'm talking about was published... early 2000's? A little bit after the first movie, at least.

_Donny 5y ago

One of my very first PC games was the Lego Racer 2. Although the racing was not as good as in the first game, it still had some interesting elements. I was completely blown away that I could build my own car and race in it. Furthermore, you could free-roam the world with your car, exploring the tracks, finding shortcuts, discovering secrets, and completing missions. I felt very disappointed that I could not build my own house, but I was still amazed by the (limited) creativity that the game provided. Funny how just a bit of freedom to create and explore in a game kicks off the fantasies in a child.

tjungblut 5y ago

I vividly remember Legoland[1] the video game, where you can manage a park and build it from the ground up. It's very similar to the rollercoaster tycoon games from back then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legoland_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legoland_(video_game)

codeulike 5y ago

There is a free-build multiplayer sandbox lego game called Lego Worlds - since 2017 Classic Space trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqTpW4wQznQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqTpW4wQznQ