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. 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.īy late 2005, the NetDevil team was wrapping up Auto Assault, and the founders began to ponder what they wanted to do next. The timing couldn’t have been better for the studio, which was located in Colorado, between Boulder and Denver. Ultimately, NetDevil’s camaraderie, experience, and sheer excitement about the project won them the contract in early 2006. Those dozen were soon whittled down to just four candidates, among them Funcom and NetDevil. In that discussion with those studios, that number dwindled to about 12, and then it came down to their creativity.” “Just from that, we probably used seven, eight months, and two to six people involved at any one time talking to all the developers. “We got replies from 50 developers and everyone who replied, we went out and saw and did some discussion with them,” Hansen said. 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. 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. 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.” “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. “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. 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. 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.”īy 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. 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. 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. 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.Ī 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 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. 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.ĭespite 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.
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