Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 407: LEGO Games

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Stuart Gipp makes his hosting debut as he intrepidly leads the charge to discuss the history of LEGO games with Jeremy Parish and Jeff Vlasek (by patron request!). This episode is guaranteed to be more enjoyable than stepping on a LEGO brick in the dark!

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, everything is awesome. Hello, welcome to Retronaut's episode 407. I'm not Jeremy Parrish. I'm actually Stuart Jip, and I'm hosting an episode for the first time ever, and I'm very grateful for that opportunity,

and I'm glad that for the first one, I've been given something that's very suited to my sort of skill level, which is a child's play thing, that would be Lego. A lot of people talk about Lego being aimed at all ages, but no, it's just for small children, and if you play with it as an adult,

you should be ashamed of yourself, frankly. No, obviously I don't mean that. It's great. Everyone loves it. Everyone loves to build. And speaking of build, they have built, see, a very fine reputation for video games, not to mention, well, models.

And again, speaking of models, let's introduce our guests on this episode. As I said, I am Stuart Chip. You may know me from rambling, about Battletoads and et cetera previously. Let's go over to, I was going to say go over to America. That doesn't narrow it down. Let's go over to, I guess, Jeremy Parrish.

There we go. Should I introduce myself? You should, even though I have now introduced you. You spoiled the surprise. Hi, I am Jeremy Parrish. I'm not sure what the segue about models was all about, but I'll take it. Yeah, it's because you're all so beautiful, you know. Oh, shucks.

Yeah, I know. And we're also made of component pieces and come with instructions. I don't know. Whatever is funniest, just think that. I mean, if you step on me, I will mess up your feet. It's true. I know that from first-hand experience. It's making the podcast sound a lot kinkier.

I thought this is a kid's show. Nailing it so far. Okay, and also with us, also joining us in this fine episode is a beloved Patreon. I believe that's correct. Are you beloved? I assume by my wife, at the minimum. I mean, she's bound to do so. But no, so I'm Jeff Flassick.

I am a long-time listener and patron. I enjoyed the show. I'm happy to peek behind the curtain and see just how the sausage is made, which now that sounds kinkier again. But no, I should just clarify, I have, I'm not in the games industry. I'm not in the games press. I am simply a lawyer in the Midwest who loves,

video games and I appreciate all the fine work you both have done and the fact that you open this by saying that you love Lego I I'm glad I chose a topic that hopefully will give us plenty of fodder and highs and lows to go through so very excited to be here I think that that brings me to a pertinent question really which is why why Lego why have you chosen Lego what is motivated this insane choice well oh when you say insane no it so I chose Lego because you know looking back in my own, so much like I will confess to it, I don't know how old you are, but Jeremy just from his piecing together kind of an Indiana Jones style piecing together how old Jeremy is. I'm a little younger. I was born in 1980. So my youth, the Venn diagram of

my youth is basically, you know, one circle is movies and specifically Star Wars. One circle is basically video games and then the last circle would be Lego. And obviously, you know, Lego video games, in particular Star Wars video games, is right there in the center. And I have to imagine that's the case for a lot of folks. You know, looking around my house here, you know, I've got many, many fond memories of Legos growing up, which I'm sure we'll all get into. But I can speak simply, we just moved to a new house in the past couple of weeks. And I spent a lot of time in a car holding some very old Lego models very, very carefully for the three-mile trek, holding the old pirate ship and things like that so it doesn't bust up two million pieces so that's that's my

brief history which i'm sure we'll get into more but that that's why i picked it you're very fortunate to have that pirate ship it was coveted by many many people oh the black seas barracuda oh yes so i had the aquizone stuff back in the early 90s and that was because you know i mean what's cool of them that you get to go into the water you get to see a big fish i don't know it's crazy uh but no i i think um you know for me As a child of the 80s, I have very vivid memories of Christmas morning building. I had to look it up because I want to see what year it came out. So I think it came out in 84, but I think I got it in an 86.

It was called King's Castle. And it is, you know, if you have Lego and I see, you know, Jeremy's nodding his head. It's a very basic castle compared to what they have now, which is, you know, so far beyond anything we had back when I was a kid. But it's a simple, you know, keep in a couple of towers and that's about it. And I remember in the late 80s, I think it was 88, 89. I went to Toys R Us and I saw the Black Seas Barracuda, the kind of the first pirate ship. And as a kid, pirates were amazing, setting aside all the, you know, millions of atrocities they committed. Pirates were cool.

You know, they were up there with dinosaurs and, and lightsabers. And I remember seeing it and seeing the price tag of like, I think it was like $89, which to an eight-year-old may have just been asking to you. It's like a million. And I remember asking for it for my birthday and my parents rolling their eyes because Legos were expensive. I remember as a kid they were expensive and just thinking like well I'll never get that and I finally did and my life was perfect

from that moment on but no I do remember building it and it's still here it's still dust covered because it's really no good way to clean them but it's there are well I'm sorry I've been I've been rambling on but I I'd love to hear kind of what you guys say about them too

just before I keep talking for the next 60 minutes about how much I love them I would like to know Jeremy if you have a an exciting history with Lego, which we could be regaled. Yes. As Jeff correctly ascertained, I am an old. And therefore, my memories of Lego and being like really avid into Lego predate the, you know, the branded sets that we see today.

So basically, when I was a kid, you had just Lego. It was just like, here's blocks, build something, kid, use your brain. I think there was like a town system, you know. where you could build, like, houses and gas stations and fire trucks and stuff. There was space. That was my favorite. And I think Castle Lego came along in the late 70s, so that would have been around. And, yeah, then pirates happened kind of toward the tail end of my interest in Lego.

They got kind of expensive, as Jeff noted. And also, I, you know, I enjoyed building them. But when they kind of focused more toward, like, here. are, you know, highly specialized pieces and you have to build stuff using these extremely specific parts. It kind of lost its interest for me. I, you know, I had basically, our parents got us a bunch of just random Legos as when I was a kid. And so we had this small cloth laundry bag full of just random Lego bricks. And I would build stuff. And, you know, the most specialized pieces that we had were these, I think they were like two by two or two by three

hinge pieces where you had just like a simple hinge and you had, you know, it just kind of scissorsed open and closed. And I would use these parts when I was a kid to create transformers, like the cartoon transformers that I could not afford as toys and make very large, cumbersome, oversized, you know, megatrons and sound waves. And I will say to my credit, I did create a transforming sound wave. It was tremendously fragile. If you tried to transform it, it would transform, and then it would fall apart. But, you know, I was very proud of my ingenuity. Incredibly. You know, kind of the, kind of the baseline of these, you know, the play and the building that we had was like, I think we had two ground plates, you know, which are like, I don't know,

32 by 32 or something very flat. One of them was just like green. I suppose it was supposed to be grass. And one of them was gray and had a T intersection of road on it. That was that was more or less my Lego experience. But I did spend a lot of time building those things and trying to figure out just how complex a mechanism I could contrive with, you know, the very, very basic system of Lego that existed. And it was mostly like white blocks with some red, some blue, some yellow, and a couple of mini-fix. Like very basic. But that's just, you know, that was kind of the early days of Lego before they realized, wow, if we license in products, everyone will spend five times as much on these already expensive products. People will build a Millennium Falcon that costs $1,000 and

makes them unable to ever use their dining table again. It was a simpler time. I just, I mean, similar to you, I just had, what kind of, I mean, similar to you. I just had, I mean, similar to you, I just had what kind of, I mean, This is not an exaggeration. This is not, like, to want to be clever. I had a bin that was full of Lego. It was actually literally a bin, but I was too stupid to make anything cool with it. So I just used the big flat, like you were describing, the big flat road pieces. And then I would construct what can only be described as an inefficient sort of Lego town.

But you mentioning the Lego Pirates has brought back a memory of tiny Lego gold der Blooms with the Lego logo logo. one that were very shiny and beautiful. And now I covered them more than I've ever covered anything else on the planet ever, to be honest. Well, and they came, when you got them, I remember, like, they were kind of a little, like, they were connected in a single piece of plastic. You had to, like, twist them off. Like, they would pop off, like, the center piece. And then, yeah, like you said, they were so small and so lightweight that they would just get all over the house. In the carpet, in the corner between the carpet, the wall, in the vents, they'd rattle around.

But, no, and something you both mentioned. which is, you're kind of having just a big bin of loose Legos. So, you know, Stuart, you had said that you weren't, I don't want to misquote you, but you weren't one of those kids that was imaginative enough or creative enough to kind of take and make a Megatron. And honestly, I was the kind of kid who I saw the model, I built the model. That's what I wanted to do. And, you know, for all those people, and I guess this is jumping ahead in time a bit,

But, you know, I see, I don't know in the UK, I think they have a version of this, like the Lego Masters show where they have kind of like it's a, it's like a reality competition where they have people who are far more dedicated to Lego than I will ever be who, you know, they're given a challenge of, you know, build a Lego windmill that will withstand, you know, X number of miles per hour's worth of wind. And these folks are, you know, I can see their minds turning with the kind of engineering background of turning this little interlocking block into something useful. like that. And Lego has seemingly had this resurgence or I guess kind of immense popularity that never seemed to exist when I was a kid. I mean, it was almost kind of like a weird niche toy almost possibly because it was so expensive. But it seems like in this day and age now, they're more popular than ever. I mean, they're everywhere. And it's not just for, you know, little kids to play as you pointed out at the beginning of show. They're really for everyone. I mean, like you go to Target now, there's two aisles of Legos, which eight-year-old Jeff would have lost his mind.

mind if he had seen that. It feels to me like it's entered a more sort of collectible sort of arena than a plaything arena in that sense. I mean, kids still, I assume kids still like to play with Lego. I haven't asked any recently, but, uh, can confirm. Okay. But when it's something along the lines of, as you mentioned, Jeremy, the Lego Millennium Falcon or the Lego, I don't know, Slave 1 or whatever it's called now, um, I believe it's

now called Boba Fett's Ship. Lego Boefebeth's ship, okay I guess you want to that's the sort of thing where you just want to set it up and as you say you were carting

that pirate ship back so it didn't have to be rebuilt in some way defeating the purpose of the Lego kit I would argue isn't the fun in building them

over and over and then smashing them and then building them that's it I mean isn't that the whole point I guess I'm the Will Ferrell character of the movie in the sense that

once the town is built I don't want to touch So, yeah, I didn't learn anything from Toy Story 2. You know, I'm more like, what is it, Alice Toy Bar and I don't want people to touch my stuff. I want it to be admired. It's for looking at, not for playing with. I feel like you have to go out of your way to get just generic blocks. I mean, you can go to the Lego store in New York and Rockefeller Center or whatever and just buy tons of generic blocks.

But, you know, when you go to the store, you mostly see guided sets that have, like I said, a lot of specialized pieces. you know, the more licensing is involved, the more specialized the pieces become. And they do have, you know, like, I think Lego City is still a thing. And there are a lot of pieces, you know, and components there that are kind of all purpose. But yeah, it does seem like it's much more guided play than, uh, than it started out as, which is, you know, a shame, but probably inevitable. I think asking children to use their imagination. Like, that's just, it's unthinkable. Who would ever do that? Like, no. No product that just gives children a blank slate to build things could ever be popular. That's nonsense. It's an absurd statement in general. And to be honest, I'm surprised you have aired it for that reason. But, yeah, nothing comes to mind. Well, and I think, you know, Jeremy, you pointed out when you were describing kind of, as you mentioned, you're an old and I'm an old and Stuart is undefined.

I'm a child. There you go. Yeah. And, but no, I mean, growing up prior to pirates, you know, my memory is, like you said, there was space and town and castle. And then there was kind of like a weird fourth category. Sometimes it was pirates. Sometimes it was the Old West. I think there was for a while.

There was the, you know, the, was it Aquazone? I forget what you mentioned. Yeah, that was my favorite. And then sometime around like the year, well, I know it was like 1999, because I think it was when Phantom Menace came out. You know, someone at Lego must have sat down on the border. room and said, you know, guys, we can make a lot more money if we just start, you know, we could do this or we could do everything and just started licensing. Like, like, there's 100 brands of Oreos now or N-Ns. It's just like, there's 100 brands of Lego. Yeah, I think, um, my, my guess is that

that might have been initiated by Lucasfilm because when Phantom Minus came out, they were just like, we have to put this brand on everything. We have to, you know, you've seen the, like, the lost Pepsi machine that is like episode one Pepsi machine and it still exists in some random town in America. They never bothered to change it out. But it's just like if it existed in 1999, there were pretty good odds that someone was going to wallpaper it with the Phantom Menace brand. So with Jake Lloyd. Yeah. Yeah. My guess is that if that really is the deviation point where Lego became a licensing thing, then it might not have been Lego saying, hey, let's take the initiative. It might have been Lucas coming to Lego and saying,

can we do this? And it's succeeding in Lego saying, let's do more of that. But I don't know. I don't want to pretend to be a Lego scholar. There are, I'm sure, Lego scholars listening to this right now, rolling their eyes in dismay at the untruths that we are shedding. We are like, to them, we are worse than anti-vaxxers. They can't help me with it was. They're not patrons. If they want to contribute and have their own version of this, that's fine. No. Pay access for spreading truth. Capital.

Exactly. No, but I think you're probably exactly right. I mean, I think, and obviously it's spiraled into a whole universe of licensed products. And I wish I had the citation in front of me, but I thought I read recently that Lego Star Wars, you know, the Star Wars brand with Lego is still like half of their profits per the year. It's something crazy like that, which doesn't surprise me. the slightest. I mean, it's the gift that keeps on giving and we'll, until the three of us are long dead. I mean, it's, because they'll keep making them. It's inevitable.

Okay. I mean, in England, in England, in a way, weird way, I would describe Lego was slightly frivolous because, you know, if you're going to build something with bricks, you might as well, you know, become a grafter and build a house. But, I mean, no. We have Macano. Did you guys have Macano in America? No. Is that a Lego product?

Macano is essentially metal that you have to physically screw together to build absurd, unfun models. It's a very British thing, I think. We had erector sets, which sounds way kinkier. this is a sexy episode

I definitely played with the Erector sets as a kid which sounds you know you can't get away with that on television these days but yeah it was like strips of metal and each strip had bolt holes in it and you would just line those up

and you know tighten screws or bolts or whatever and yeah they were kind of spindly and honestly you could probably hurt someone with them Yeah, they seem dangerous. Yeah, they seem sharp. The edges are not filed off very well from my memory. Yeah. They're all pretenders, though, megablocks and stickle bricks and fuzzy felt.

They're all pretenders, connects, rubbish. Nobody likes that. In block, the Nintendo's version. I was going to say, I think part of it was the patent on the Lego brick itself expired. And so that's why megablocks kind of just swooped in. Like, they interlock because it's basically the exact same design. And I know that for all of Lego, licensing, they do not make licensed products based off of R-rated properties. And so that's why

you haven't seen an aliens Lego set. That's why they don't... Basic instinct. Right, exactly. Yeah. I mean, if you're not going to see, you're not going to see something... It would work with no effort. Oh, boy. Yeah. It would be so easy. If they can scrub it down to a PG-13 version, which is about six minutes long, it just includes mostly credits. It might work out. But no, it's why, like, there's, you know, Megablocks has Halo and Game of Thrones and other franchises, which Lego just simply, they won't touch because I know that on the Lego website, they have some sort of system where you can submit ideas for things to get made, and if it gets enough crowd support, they will go through and actually make that particular product. And there

was one design of the, was it the Winchester from Sean of the Dead, which, you know, which won. I mean, it was a really neat looking set. And Lego politely said, we can't make this. It's an R-rated property, and we're not going to do it. So, you know, they still see themselves in some capacity as they, like you said, Stuart, a kid's toy. So I thought you meant the actual gun from the film, but you mean the pub. Well, they would make that for sure. There's no problem.

Yeah, a Lego gun. Oh, wow. But while we are here to discuss the excellence of Lego, we are also here to discuss the video games thereof, as is our want to do here on Retronauts. And I didn't want to get into a whole sort of super-eastern, depth history of Lego games, because there's a real, we want to focus on, you know, Lego Star Wars and onwards when they really became sort of prominent. And I think there's a lot of people now who are probably yelling at me that I'm not talking about Lego Island right now.

And, you know, all I can say to that is one, maybe later and two, probably not, let's face it. As good as, as amazing as Lego Island is, we're not, that's not today. That's not today. So does anyone? I think there is a conversation to be had about how long it took Lego to actually. figure out how to be video games. And that's really weird because you would think like they just go together perfectly. That's strange because I would argue the option. This is what they pay me for to pick the opposite side. But I would say, you know, how do you take a kid's toy that is inherently tactile? And if you're not like me, require some imagination to put things together and turn it into a

really a two-dimensional screen where you have to manipulate pieces together. I mean, at best case, Or you have Tetris, which already exists, or you have what came before the Lego Star Wars series, which is, as Stewart pointed out, not setting the world on fire. I mean, the people have fun memories of things like Lego races, where you could sort of piece together your car. But the really early stuff, the very funny remembered stuff like Lego Island. So my memory is more of a just kind of almost multimedia sort of showcase rather than a showcase of like, here's how we can transplant Lego into this sort of digital world. I mean, as you say, it feels almost like a Thalzeron, because when you take away that physicality, then you're left with just, look, I've made a picture of a spaceship or something, which is not as good. So I want to travel back in time to the dim and distant year of 1995.

When, you know, 3D gaming was very first kind of entering the mainstream, Sony PlayStation launched, Sega Saturn launched, Nintendo 64 was a year away, Quake was a year away. you know, everything was moving toward 3D. And in 1995, Douglas Copeland wrote a novel or published a novel called Microsurfs. And I don't know if either of you have ever read this, but it was my textbook in college, my like aspirational. This is, you know, my vision of what I want life to be, which is not really maybe ideal. But basically microsurfs was about a bunch of coders, like, you know, six or seven coders who worked at Microsoft and found themselves incredibly frustrated and bored with the extremely corporate lifestyle there.

And one of the coders eventually is his stock in the company vests. And so he's like, well, I'm cashing out and I'm going to move to Silicon Valley and start my own company and create something. Everyone should come with me. So everyone ends up going, you know, moving from Redmond to Silicon Valley and starts this company with the kind of the guy who was taking the initiative. And they create a product called Oop, which was like object oriented program or something like that. But it basically was Lego. It was virtual Lego. And the entire premise of this is that they were trying to figure out

how to make virtual Lego fun. And what they came up with was actually pretty much Minecraft, about 15 years before Minecraft existed. And, you know, that book, I was really drawn to the prose. And, you know, it's kind of an epistolary novel. So it's, you know, very much about personal perspectives. It was kind of like a blog before there were such things as blogs, Minecraft before there were such things as Minecraft. But I was really intrigued by, you know,

the way they worked through the problems of how do you make Lego, this tactile thing, fun in 3D space, you know, on a computer screen. when so few people have experience working with 3D. And, you know, if you look back to Super Mario 64 the following year, Nintendo was like, whoa, 3D, that's complicated and weird. No one knows how to do this. Let's tell them that the camera is actually a floating turtle with, you know, with a camera on a fish pole.

So, you know, it was something that was still very much, this whole 3D thing, navigating 3D space, dealing with 3D space was very much. much kind of up in the air this question. But after reading the novel, you know, it all seemed to make sense. And I was very frustrated afterwards that there was no such thing as a Lego game because the book made me think this could work. And I remember there was some application and I can't remember the name of it. I couldn't find it when I was trying to look it up. It came out in probably 96, 97 for Macintoshes and I think PCs. And it wasn't really a game. It was just like a

3D, essentially Lego building simulation. And I thought, well, this kind of seems like it would be the thing they described in microsurfs. But it wasn't because it didn't have the sort of immersive, you know, I think they kind of looked at Habitat and, you know, kind of early online muds and chats for some inspiration there. And it just didn't have that. And so, you know, when Lego games came along, properly branded Lego games came along a few years later, I was very frustrated that they didn't really seem to do much. with the premise of, hey, this is Lego, a game. You should be able to build, but you can't. And,

you know, even when the Traveler's Tales Lego games came along, they really just kind of seem to say, oh, yeah, there's pieces and stuff. You can kind of build things by holding down a button. And it really does feel like no one figured it out until Minecraft, which ironically is now owned by Microsoft, which is the company that the characters of microsurfs were trying to escape so they could build their Lego game. So it's all circular. Microsoft owns everything in the end. But, yeah, to me, that's kind of, that's always been sort of my golden standard

for virtual Lego for 25 years now. And I don't have time to mess with Minecraft or Roblox or things like that. But it is cool that, you know, eventually that thing they were trying to build in this novel 25 years ago did exist. And now kids have pretty much free access to it anytime they want and an opportunity to be creative without having to spend, you know, $120 to build Boba Fett's spaceship. Oh, boy. I can't wait for future history 101 today. I hear Prof. Timesworth is going to teach us about World War Six.

Gather round, students. It is. time to learn. Podford University, where history and future are the same class. Available on iTunes, Spotify, and everywhere you get podcasts. Hey, Lassie, what are you doing here? Timmy's in a well. Sequelcast Two in Friends is a podcast looking at movies in a franchise, one film at a time, like Harry Potter, Hellraiser, and The Hobbit.

And sometimes the host talk about video games and TV as well. And now it's part of the Greenlit podcast network. Oh, Lassie, we don't need a rescue Timmy. He likes the well. Well enough, I guess. North Vader is Luke's father. Lassie, I told you to play off the spoilers. I think even before, this is maybe slightly cynical,

even before the TT games, it felt like in the sort of PlayStation 1 sort of years around then, the impetus of the Lego games was to advertise the Lego sets rather than to, like, not replace them obviously, but to provide any kind of viable alternative. It's like, hey, do you like the Rock Raiders? Well, why don't you go and buy some Rock Raiders sets or bionical sets or whatever?

It's all there for, you know, multimedia synergy. And I don't like saying that makes me sound like the boss from Dilbert, but it's true. You're not small enough. That's true. Well, and I think, Jeremy, you pointed it out. You know, I think when they took a look at how do we turn this, you know, inherently, you know, building block toy

into a virtual space. And after sitting down and thinking about it and putting a lot of effort, the answer is we're not going to. So we're just going to sidestep it almost. And really, you know, that is one of the key components, I think, of the Travelers Tales games, is that they, I mean, there is building in them.

And we can, we'll get to that, I'm sure. But you're not really, you're holding on a button while the pieces assemble themselves. And so they're almost less Lego games and more licensed game. They're just like licensed product games it happened to star Lego characters. So, yeah, the answer seems to be like, you know, we'll do it for you,

and it's just an action game, and that just happens to be it. I mean, Lego Star Wars, which we'll get into, obviously, it's almost like a money printing machine right there. That's how it seems to me. The way that the building works in that game and the way the mini kits work and stuff like that, all of it is just angled towards like, hey, imagine if these models were in your hands and you were pretending to do this on like a fake, like, can'tina or something. Wouldn't that be cool?

But that's not to say they're not good games, which, of course, we'll get into. But Travelers Tales who develop these, and I believe the cases now that Travelers Tales seem to only develop these, they had a sort of history, a pedigree for licensed games before this. They're probably best known in the sort of 16-bit era for stuff like, well at least over here they were best known for things like Pugsy and games like

Galahad which was Leander on the Amiga I'm not sure how they were perceived in America they did Sonic 3D Blast as well which is a fairly well regarded video game but they did do their own stuff they did their own stuff like they did Haven

Call of the King on PS2 which I believe was an enormous failure which is a shame because any game that's advertised with full page commercials with a picture of a man with a goatee wearing a hoodie and it just says imagine a game that is all games how could it fail to sell millions of copies you know exactly what does that mean to you like when you hear that but i'm not going to rag on hay haven i'm sure it's a 10 out of 10 but uh no no clue but did you did you have any experience with travelers sales prior to these lego titles at

all because they've been around a fair while uh so i the only thing i can say is when i went back and looked at their, you know, their history, you know, their, their CV of their products they had made. The one that stuck out to me, not that I think I ever played it, but they made a version of Bram Stoker's Dracula. I think for like the Super Nintendo and I'm sure probably the Genesis as well. But, and I thought like, wow, what an odd. I remember the box art because I saw it at Blockbuster or the local, you know, network video when I was a kid. And, you know, the movie came out in 93, so I would have been about 13 years old. And I remember thinking, Like, that's an odd choice because it's, you know, the movie was very much a romantic version of the Dracula tale, very sort of sensual. There we go again, the Lego podcast drifting into kink. But it just when I watched a video of a let's play of it and just saw how kind of it's just Keanu Reeves character walking left to right and stabbing things. And I remember thinking, what an odd choice to make. But then I saw like you were saying, Stuart, they kind of went down this rabbit hole very quickly of just making licensed games.

games. And not that there's anything wrong with that. It sells copies. People like licensed products. I mean, Lord knows that's probably half of video games, at least certainly in the 90s were licensed products. But sorry, Jeremy, I'm sure you have other experiences that you want to mention or at least things I'm forgetting. So not really. I was aware of Travelers Tales just kind of by name, but I don't know that I ever necessarily played anything by them. It always seemed like, you know, the games that I saw their name on were, I kind of grouped them in the same category as games by, like, ocean, you know, just like, here is, here is a game that is probably okay. It will kill some time. It is based on, you know, a property that you recognize from television or film. But, you know, it's not necessarily going to be the most amazing game. And I just never. Yeah, I don't think I ever saw any of those games and said, I've got to play this.

And so they just kind of, you know, were there like providing sort of the bulk fodder for game shelves. You know, something for the things that I was interested in to stand out to make the things that interested me shine by comparison. They had a sort of reputation back on their work with the Megadrive, sorry, the Genesis. excuse me. They had a reputation for extremely impressive visuals, extremely impressive use of like parallax and things like that.

One of my favorite little Traveler's Tales trivia things is their game I previously mentioned Pugsy, which is an original sort of platform puzzle game. It uses the RAM, the save RAM, but it doesn't actually have a safe feature. It's just copy protection. If you play it on an

emulator, it will not let you go past a certain point because it detects that you are able to save, and therefore it locks the game. which is fascinating to me, frankly. It's pretty clever. I don't think it has a battery in there or anything. I don't know how it works. I'm no, not Mr. Tech Genius.

I don't know. But John Burton, one of the founders of Traveller's Tales, if you look for his YouTube channel, unfortunately, I forgot the name of it. I think it might be Game Hut, unless he's moved. There are a lot of really interesting videos about how they achieved some really impressive visual effects, like full motion video, one, a megadrive cartridge

for the intro of Sonic 3D. But they essentially did continue working on license games all the way up through the PlayStation 2 area. They worked on some pretty big ones. They worked on Crash Bandicoot at the Wrath of Cortex, which is really impressive looking game visually, but one of the more

criticized games in that series. And it wasn't until they worked on stuff like Super Monkey Ball Adventure, Sonic R, they did Sonic R as well, which is a pretty well-beloved Saturn game. But it wasn't until they did get to 2005 when they did

Lego Star Wars, the video game, which is the first one of these, the main subject of this podcast, hopefully. And speaking from my perspective, that was a pretty huge game. Everyone was into that when it dropped, because you wouldn't really think so. Because other than the sort of fever pitch for Star Wars Episode 3, which I might add turned out to be an amazing movie, there was also the whole novelty factor of the whole Lego thing, because at the time, while Lego wasn't unpopular from my perspective, there was a case of just like, it's part of the furniture. You don't really think about it. It just exists. Does that make sense? So to come along with this kind of, we've recreated the Star Wars movies, the prequels,

but we've done it with no dialogue. We've made like puppet versions of those, like my versions of those movies that were genuinely quite funny and like well-timed. They reviewed pretty well. And, you know, I thought it was good to play as well. And to be honest, I had no idea that we'd be sitting here now some, like, God, how many years later, 16 years later, and they're making, now this is reductive, but they are making essentially the same game. There's not a huge amount of variation in these. We will get into it. But that's what we call a really robust kind of, almost a genre unto itself, these Lego titles. I've rambled on quite a lot.

Original Lego Star Wars, did any of you have any experience with this one when it came back, when it came out? So I'll jump in here. Yeah. So I have very kind of vivid memories of Lego Star Wars, the original. know when I first heard about it being made, probably through IGN, or I think I probably still had Nintendo Power coming to my apartment in the law school, because I just never turned off the subscription. But I remember, you know, kind of like you were saying, Stuart, Star Wars was

taking a weird path. Attack of the Clones had kind of left people as a, they gave Phantom Minus a bit of a pass saying, well, he'll get, he'll write the ship with Attack of the Clones. And the Attack of the Clones came out. People thought, I think I'm done here. But I do want to see him get burned alive. So I guess I'm getting amped up for Revenge of the SIF. You mean Anakin, we want to say Anakin? Not George Lucas, right. I was going to say, yeah, no, no, that would take a long time. But, no, so he, yeah, and I can't criticize the man.

He gave me, well, how many, you know, years of countless memories. But, no, I remember, you know, slowly the pitch was building for Revenge of the Sith. And I was finishing up my first year of law school. And it was the spring of 2005. And I remember in, it was March, because they were. were going to release the second trailer for the movie. And here in America, because it was all a Fox product, they had tied it into, you had to watch an episode of the OC, which that show has been off the air now for whatever 15 years or so. But of course, people like me who had never watched a single episode of the show were forced to sit there and wait for it to pop up during a commercial break so you could see the trailer. And so they showed the trailer, you know, it gave you all the things you want to see, you know, Mustafa and Obi-Wan fighting Anakin. And, and. I thought, okay, yeah, I like it. I like the first, you know, one and two were good for their own reasons, but I am excited

again. And then Lego Star Wars came out like two weeks later or three weeks later. And it was just the movie. I mean, there was no effort to hide any of it. I mean, it was, it came out a month and a half before Revenge of the SIP hit the theaters. And the entire thing was just in there because, you know, DLC, if it existed, I'm sure, I'm sure in some capacity it did, but I bought it for the GameCube. So it wasn't like they were going to wait and send.

you the levels later as a downloadable feature. And so I remember renting it and playing it and thinking, oh, I guess that's it. So as of March 25th, 2005, I knew how Revenge of the Sith was going to end from playing Lego Star Wars. And, you know, I don't want to, I'm sure Jeremy has more things to say too, but it was a surprisingly fun experience that I think people didn't necessarily, like you said, Stuart, people didn't know what to expect because the Lego brand hadn't really made a successful video game to date, and Star Wars hadn't really had a huge knockout of the park game in a while. You had kind of the PS2 era licensed, you know, Phantom Menace games and Starfighter. I think Jedi Outcast had been out for a while

before then. But there was, there was Cotor in 2003. That was right. But it was kind of, you know, the opposite tack of Lego Star Wars. Yeah, right. No, you're absolutely right. I think there hadn't been a true, you know, since like the Super Star Wars era, you know, S&S games and things like that. There wasn't just a straightforward kind of successful action Star Wars game. Like an adaptation of the movie, of any of the movies, so to speak. Yeah, I mean, and I know, if I remember correctly, I'm sure there was, there was an adaptation, just a straight adaptation of the film, Revenge of the Sith that I, when I worked at Best Buy that summer, sold very well, but it was a terrible game for. what I remember people telling me. It's very bad, but there's a versus mode you unlock when you finish it, which is excellent. However, you can simply put a cheat code in and not have to play the whole of the rest of the crappy games, so I advise you to do that.

Also, in some ways, it's like Lego Star Wars, where it's a co-op game, which I'm sure we'll get into, but the best part about Revenge of the Sith or the Lego Star Wars game is that the last few levels on Mustafa, where one person is Anakin and one person's Obi-Wan, you spend 95% of the levels working together as a team and then the final battle is you promptly turning on your co-op partner and just hacking them to death. Thus, revealing

the shocking ending of Revenge of the Sith, which is that Anakin Skywalk becomes Darth Vader. Oh, God, did he, uh, you know, I can't believe you spoiled that for me. Sorry for the spoilers, listeners. Feel free to send me hate mail. I will delete.

Yeah, I am, I did not play Lego Star Wars. but I was definitely aware of it and it did review very well and I remember, you know, I was working at Oneup.com at the time the site was a couple of years old at that point, so still pretty new.

And I do remember everyone there being really into it, surprisingly so, because, you know, as Jeff said, Lego games, not the best track record to that point. It was kind of like, you know, they existed and they kind of got lumped with Barbie games

and Nickelodeon games like, Okay, here's some grist for your child mill. I mean, they sort of were that, to be fair. They weren't that far off that kind of, just here's a kid's game. And that's dismissive. I don't mean to, you know, it's me. I like games that are kids games, but that's pretty much what they were. They were just more sort of, look, this is part of the franchise.

When you have games designed specifically for kids, that's not automatically a sign of, oh, this is garbage. But it does mean that when you come across one that has. has real thought and care put into the design of it and consideration given for the balance, it is pretty unusual and remarkable. So, you know, things like Way Forward's Thor game for DS, like people were kind of blown away by that because it's like, wow, it looks great and it's, it's actually kind of well designed. That's weird. You don't expect that from this property. So, so Lego, yeah, Lego fell into that category. It was very much that. So people went into this not expecting much.

Star Wars games, you have the occasional success. You had like the Starfighter games. You had Cotor, but there were so many Star Wars games. And you also, you know, along with the good ones, for every good one you had something like Masters of Taras Kasi or something, where you were like, oh, why does this exist? You know, or was it Star Wars demolition where everyone, it was basically like, yeah, it was twisted metal. Yeah, it was twisted metal, but you were flying around in Boba Fett's. Starfighter or the Yodomobile or whatever the hell. I don't know. So there were not a lot of reasons to anticipate this game being good in any remarkable way. But it was, and I think it had

a few things going for it, besides the element of surprise, which as we all know from the Spanish Inquisition, is a really important factor. But in addition to the element of surprise and the fanatical devotion to the Pope, the appeal of of Lego Star Wars was really, it kind of beat the Wii to the punch. The Wii being a platform designed for very casual players, people who think, well, you know, it'd be fun to play a video game of some sort if it were something that interested me, but they're so complicated, they're so challenging, they're so nerdy, they're so hard. You know, just the Wii really went a long way toward making video games approachable on a

television. And a lot of a lot of Wii game design philosophy was that there is no shame in a game being pretty easy. And in a game, you know, not requiring Dark Souls three levels of gameplay mastery and devotion in order to complete. And Lego Star Wars was here. It showed up a year before the Wii launched a year and a half. And it was, it was basically presenting that style of game design. And it's not like, you know, casually oriented games didn't exist before. that. But here was one that wore not one but two internationally recognizable brands. Like, that's a double whammy of, I see this on the shelf. I don't like video games, but I do like me some Star Wars. And yeah, you know, I had fun playing Lego. Maybe I'll pick this up and the kids will

enjoy it. And all of a sudden, you know, grandma or, or, you know, your uncle who just likes to work on cars and guns, like they're spending time playing the game because it's something they can really easily relate to. There's not a whole lot of challenge. They don't have to spend a lot of time watching cutscenes. Every cutscene is like 10 seconds long and has no words, just, you know, robots grunting or whatever. And it just, it's extremely, it has extremely low barriers to entry, very low friction. They, they were charming, recognizable, iconic, just very intuitive. And, you know, the kind of thing you can pick up and play. And, There is a lot of, you know, among gamers with a capital G, there is a lot of dismissal of that sort of game as being somehow inferior or bad.

But that's not true. It's games for people who aren't necessarily you, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think this is a game for everyone else. I think one of the best things about this game, I mean, it has that low barrier to entry. But if you do get sort of hooked on it, or if you are a, a more sort of seasoned player of video games. You know, there is plenty there that is more challenging. Acquire, like, you need to acquire a certain number of little Lego coins,

which I think are called studs in the game. I don't know why I said I think they are. I know they are. I know they are. I know they are. I know exactly what they are. And getting a certain number of those will give you this kind of true Jedi ranking, which gives you one of the gold bricks, which, you know,

it's things that everyone can understand, which is do these things, get gold bricks, use gold bricks to get new, like, characters, vehicles, etc., etc., etc. And other than just making it away from beginning to end, with no, the only punishment for death being that you lose some of your studs, and if you don't really care about that, then who cares? Big deal. There's also the 10, like, quite well-hidden mini-kits to find in each level. It's not a gold brick. There's the red power bricks, which gives you cheats. Some of those are multipliers for studs,

which means it gets easier to do the other stuff as you make your way through the game. You can unlock new characters, and that's another huge draw for Star Wars fans. If you can think of a Star Wars character who appeared in those prequels, you can play as them, no matter who they are, all the way down to the Goncger Age or something. No, I think I think you're right. And this, you touched on something that Jeremy mentioned, too, which is that, you know, kids games, you know, kids games in quotes, when they're well designed, you know, they will survive and surpass, uh, just the kind of moniker of, oh, it's a Barbie game or it's a, you know, Paul Patrol. I don't know what kids like these days anymore.

Uh, but, uh, you mean, the fact that you can't die in any Lego game, I mean, I don't think you've ever. in any of the Lego Star Wars games forward. You simply bust into bits. You get punished in the sense that you lose your studs. You can collect them again right there on the spot. You'll respawn right there as well. There's no, you don't lose any progress.

And I think that, you know, as you pointed out, you know, the challenge is baked into the sort of, you know, collectathon nature, which, you know, ramped up exponentially as the series went on. You know, it's, at this point it kind of rivals Assassin's Creed in terms of, okay, here's a map of

England, go ahead and find every single little nook and cranny and spend 65 hours. Mercifully, the Lego games have never, they don't take quite that long. Not quite. But yeah, it hit that spot where Travelers Tales realized people want to have fun playing video games. And we're going to give them the ability and the control to do that. If you want to blow through the game and play through all three episodes just to see the beats of the movie, just like you could back with old licensed games from the 90s, you can do that. And that's fine. But if you want to find every character, if you want to find all the mini kits,

if you want to build your own characters as the series went on later, you can do that too. And you have, as you mentioned Stuart, the cheats. I mean, it is cheating in games, that's the wrong word, I suppose. If you want the ability to make yourself a deity and to, you know, basically, exploits. There you go. Pro strats. Exactly.

Yeah. It's something that, you know, apart from GTA these days, there aren't very many games that embrace sort of the, the exploitation, licensed exploitation system of, you know, the control of being a, you know, you can have a 16 stud multiplier, just rack them up and buy all the things you want. And now you can do whatever you want. It's your game. You paid for it. Do whatever you want. One of the most, you know, hardcore games ever, the Quake, which just got re-released. I love Quake. I love to play Quake on very high difficulty. But if you think as a kid, I wasn't putting the cheats on every time I played that game, then you are wrong. Because that's the most fun thing.

all the cool stuff in the game, you know, and using, anyone can see all the stuff in Lego Star Wars, just as long as they don't mind banging their head against it a little bit, they'll make their way through. Everyone will see everything. Jeff, you mentioned the older Star Wars games, you know, and watching the beats. Like, if you compare this game to what we had a decade prior, which were sculptured software's Super Star Wars games, like there's a world of difference between the overall philosophy of gameplay, between super, you know, return of the general. Jedi and Lego Star Wars. You know, one of them is extremely high difficulty, just high friction.

You get to play as different characters, you know, follow the beats of the movie with some weird changes. Or, you know, you look at Lego and you can kind of play it through legitimately or, you know, just rework it however you want. And, you know, that's, it's a much more kind of buffet style approach to video games. Not only is there a large amount of content, but you can kind of pick and choose what you want and the experience you want to have. And, you know, that's really appealing and it's really smart design. And I'm not a huge fan of the Lego TT games, but I do recognize the fact that they are super approachable. And they do a good enough job with, you know, the play control and the mechanics that, you know, one of my, one of my big memories of,

of Lego Star Wars, the original trilogy, was not playing it, but watching my nephew play. And he was probably about four or five years old at the time and really just not quite there in terms of hand-eye coordination and really grasping what you need to do with objectives in the game. But actually, he wasn't even that old. He must have been like three or four. But, you know, he kept just messing around and he constantly get destroyed by stormtroopers and Jawa. and whatever. And he didn't care. He just, you know, kept running around collecting gyms and stuff or studs and having a great time. It was very frustrating to watch him fail to understand like, you just need to go over and build this moisture evaporator. But it was okay because he was having a

great time. I wasn't watching him. I was like, oh, let's get beyond the scene, please. I want to see a different area than this little pit on tattooing. But it's fine. It was it was something that he could just zone out and kind of practice his hand-eye coordination and, you know, not have a lot of expectations and stress and pressure placed on him. And I think that's great for kids. And, you know, at the same time, I look ahead to Lego Dimensions and sort of the kerfuffle, I guess you would say that I had with the producer on that because I gave it a very poor rating on, sorry, on Nintendo Wii U. And there were only like two or three. three other reviews on Metacritic at the time for Wii use. So it tanked the Metacritic average,

which was not my intention. It was just like that was the platform I played it on. But I had a lot of complaints about it because I felt like the series had actually gotten more complicated and the objectives had become more opaque. So, you know, looking back to the way my nephew kind of struggled with Lego Star Wars because he was three years old and didn't really get what he was supposed to do versus, you know, watching my mother try to play Lego Dimensions and see the Doctor Who content and kind of struggling to understand where she was supposed to go and how some of the mechanics were supposed to work that weren't really kind of explained that well. Yeah, that was, it was kind of frustrating because I felt like, you know, if they had stuck

to more of the, the approachable style of the original Lego Star Wars, those early games, like the dimensions could have been much more accessible, but, but it, it, it kind of fumbled and became overly complicated in some ways. And, you know, there was, there was delight to be taken, I would say, in the content tourism and seeing like, oh, there's, you know, Scooby-Doo, there's Doctor Who, there's all kinds of mortal combat, like all kinds of weird stuff just combined in here. But not, I would say, as, as intuitive for someone who never plays video games to immediately jump into and, and be able to enjoy on the same level as the early Lego games. So, you know, I really, I do think well of the early Lego games, and I do feel like

as they've gotten more video gamer-e, they've lost a little bit of that, that early quality that was so endearing and appealing. I do agree with that completely. I mean, I remember Lego Dimensions had the same sort of problem that I had with some of the more contemporary games at the time, which is that levels seem to be about an hour long, like unbroken, just no save points hour, which is insane I don't know what they were thinking I mean Lego Star Wars 2 the original trilogy which followed the following year

and then the following year after that we got the complete saga which combined both those games into one sort of major mega game I think it's worth sort of talking about that rather than individually talking about Lego Star Wars 2 the original trilogy because well what it did was it did the exact same essential thing

as Lego Star Wars 1 but with the movies that people actually liked so what you had finally recreate all of the favorite scenes from the original Star Wars Trilogy, episodes 4, 5, and 6 and as a result, very, very fondly remembered

game. In terms of actual sort of gameplay development, it really was very similar. There was, I believe that was the first one to have custom characters where you could piece together random bits of other characters and create like Darth Wookie or like, I don't know,

I was trying to think of a funny one, but nothing came to mind unfortunately, so, you know, think of your own listeners and laugh. I was going to say, I do remember, and you touched on this in the notes, and it's worth kind of pointing out. I mean, these games inherently have, from the very beginning, kind of a, I want to say goofy, but a sense of humor to them. I mean, they, they, that is a critical part of the Lego series, at least the TT

Lego series, which is these games are goofy. They're kind of poking fun at the, the franchise itself to some degree. Yeah, I don't know kind of what I would call the humor. It's not like Wario-style kind of bathroom humor, but it certainly isn't Monty Python, high-brow humor. It's more kind of like silly, you know, like a character will pull a fish out of a box or something like that. Or they'll pull a banana instead of a lightsaber out of their holster or something like that. But it needs that kind of silliness as part of the product. And as Jeremy said, it helps make it open to a wider audience because, you know, as a gamer with a capital G may roll their eyes to think this is stupid.

A kid's probably going to love it. I can't speak to that. It's been a long time since I met a kid. But I think that kind of silliness is inherent to the product. And it was necessary. When you were pointing out the ability to construct your own character, I remember each Lego game as like a secret someplace always winds up having like a weird hot tub scene, like where you walk into a room and there's a bunch of stormtroopers in a bathtub, like all in a hot tub together.

And so, of course, when you can construct your own character, at least one of them involves like, you know, the bottom component is just a guy wearing a bathing suit and you could put like a Darth Vader, you know, helmet on him and then you can walk around with the guy with a lightsaber who's wearing a bathing suit. I mean, it's never more than PG style kind of rude humor. But I think that's, you know, kind of one of those components that you forget. And especially once they started using the real voices from the movie, that kind of takes, it's a weird dynamic when you have. Yeah. Yeah. When you have Oscar Isaac or someone talking, then he pulls, you know, a banana out of holster to shoot a stormtrooper like, hmm, that's, that really jives.

Yeah, I remember when they first showed a Lego game with voice acting, you know, taken directly from the movie, it was Lego Lord of the Rings. And they revealed that to us at a pre-E3 event, and I think it was Judges Week. And they showed the trailer, and it's got like, you know, the Lego graphics and visuals and characters, mini-figs, etc. but it's all just like verbatim dialogue from the films and they were so proud of it. They were like, yeah, now Lego, you know, Lego Lord of the Rings is like the real thing. It's taken straight from the movie. And there were just crickets after the trailer rolled. We were all, everyone in the room was like, wow, this really misses the mark.

This isn't what anyone wants. I like the way, you know, at least Disney Infinity handled it a little better by giving you sound a lot. likes and not just using voice clips from the films, but, you know, kind of giving you characters who sounded enough like the characters that you love and want to play as to get the point across, but, you know, not just slavishly taking content from the films, you know, adapting the tone and the style more to the video game situation. So, yeah, I do think that was a pretty big misstep. I understand why they did it. because, you know, licensing is weird.

And some people like things that are bad if it's familiar. But, yeah, I feel like the series really kind of put its best foot forward. You know, it made its intentions clear from the very beginning of Lego Star Wars. If you jump into the Phantom Minus, it kind of recreates the opening scenes of Phantom Minus, which just kind of jumps right into it with the ship docking in the space station and the Jedi getting out. and then the guns inside the space station turning and blasting the ship. And you have exactly that happening. But once the ship is destroyed, you have the two pilots there and they're like suspended

in midair like Wiley Coyote. And they look at each other and then they fall and they kind of break into little pieces. You know, I guess that's how Legos die. They fall apart. But, you know, it takes something that was kind of a brutal beginning for a movie and recreates it in a sort of harmless, fun way. And it did a good job of basically saying, like, this is what it's going to be. Like, it's going to be the thing that you like, but done as sort of a Saturday morning pantomime cartoon, you know, very lighthearted. Don't take it too seriously. We're just

here to have some fun. And it was, you know, a very good start for the whole thing. I think in Empire Strikes Back in Lego Star Wars 2, they had the pivotal moment of Darth Vader pulling out a little framed photograph of himself standing behind like baby Luke with his hands on his shoulders or something silly as silly as silly as that which is just I think he points at himself and then points at Luke as if like yes we have to I have to explain this about saying the line right but I mean I agree that introducing the voices and not so much when they were doing say original stories which they started doing I want to say Lego Batman 2 fully voiced original stories

but when you're just doing little Lego Frodo going Gandalf and all that it's just weird I don't know why they thought that would be good I really I mean a pantomime version Lord of the Rings would be incomprehensible but you know at least it would be novel

I had problems with that game in general because that was when the series had gotten really bloated and difficult for me though yeah and just you know we're jumping ahead to really present day I know we're talking now the week after they kind of revealed the new trailer for, uh, what is it? The Skywalker saga. Yeah. And again, I watched it once. I thought, I'm, I'm going to buy that game. It's inevitable. But I will say that some of the voice

acting in it, either they had Mark Hamill re-record those lines or something, because you watch the movies enough, you can recognize like, okay, I know the delivery of this particular line. And obviously, Mark Campbell is an accomplished voice actor, almost at this point, probably more so than being Luke Skywalker. But hearing those lords come out of his mouth, I thought, either they got, had a really odd sound alike, or he sat down and re-recorded those, which seems, again, like a weird decision. I don't, but beat it as it may. The other thing I did want to point out, just before we kind of forget it, you know,

one of the other critical components of these games is that they are all multiplayer, all of them. And all of them are two-player co-op, period. I mean, they just are from the get-go. Drop-in, drop-out any time, like, as accessible as they could possibly be really. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, some of them have online features, I guess, not a lot. They're not, yeah.

I mean, I know the early ones obviously didn't. And some of the later ones, I think they just said, eh, the hell of it. You could, it's couch co-op or, you know, get your friends, your spouse, your kids, whatever. But, I mean, to your point, that builds the fun. I mean, that's being able to sit there with your friend, although in Jeremy's case, watching his nephew toil away, you know, kind of painfully to get the same studs over and over again. But, you know, having somebody there at all times cooperating or, you know, I think you can hurt each other. I can't remember if you can. You can.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So there's that aspect, too. So there you go. So, of course, the combat in these games is really not that much more than just mashing the punch button, really. It's not, but I do appreciate the fact that they give you a little bit of nuance. You know, you can, you can hold a button to block.

So, you know, it is not just like you're going to run around and get killed. you do have the option. If you don't want to constantly die and have to pick up your studs, you can at least, you know, have some self-defense and kind of choose to approach the game more tactically if that's, you know, what you want. But you don't have to do it that way. I think I've played every single one of these games. I don't think I knew you could block, which would make them a lot easier. Yes. Well, at least in, you know, Lego Star Wars, you could hold down a button to block with your lightsaber. Yes, of course, because you could deflect blasters as well, I believe.

The laser from the blast is not someone throwing them at you, obviously. I believe they are called bolts, not lasers. Oh, I apologize. Blaster. It's all right. It's all right. No one in science fiction uses lasers. They use phasers. They use blasters. They use, you know, disruptors.

But not lasers. Please. Please. Dr. Evil used a laser, and that's technically science fiction. I thought that was a documentary. Why don't they ever do Lego Austin Powers? There were three of those movies. Oh, they are rated, though, aren't they? Why? Well, no.

Well, and why haven't they done Lego James Bond? I mean, it seems like... I've been saying that for like a decade. The only thing I can imagine, and I wonder the same thing. It's a PG-13 series, although, you know, sometimes it pushes the limits of what you want your 12-year-old watching, I suppose. Yeah, I mean, how do you do the general torture scene from Casino Royale in Lego form? And, you know, explain that to the kids. Yeah, he's hitting James Bond and the testicles until he breaks.

have him just be a couple of those tiny little one stud blocks I mean if I could buy a Lego Mads Mickelson I will buy it that is inevitable although maybe there is a version of him from Dr. Strange I don't know if his character was Legofide

but I mean the only thing I can think for James Bond is that whereas Star Wars or Lord of the Rings has inherent unique epic sets ships, castles etc. I mean James Bond you have his ass to Martin, but by and large, it's mostly just buildings, tanks. I don't even know if they make Lego tanks. It seems like that might, you know, military stuff isn't really their thing, at least not

real military, I should say. I mean, you could have like the, the Lego Golden Ice satellite. You could have, you know, Lego Largo with the teeth or no, I guess that was Jaws. That's what his name was. Jaws, yeah. You could have a Lego, yeah, the, oh, that'd be great. Like lots of little mini-fig hats You could have the Lego

Smokestack that he drops Blofeld into the Lego the Lego pigeon that does the double take when he comes out of the gondola in Venice Yeah, so many possibilities What about a Lego elephant that wins on the slots

and Diamonds are forever? That's the best chance bond moment ever. Can we just design this game instead of talking about the rest of the Lego games? Can we just design this game instead? Please. Yeah, just the small variations because the Lego, Sean Connery would have, you know, a toupee.

Well, I guess they all have tupeys, I suppose, since their hair pops off. So that just writes itself. See, Daniel Craig didn't have a toupee, and then No Time to Die got delayed by two years, and now he does. So wild. That's right. Well, they'll have to make his facial features more brooding than the other James Bond, and certainly more so than Roger Moore. They're actually renamed the film No Time to Pay.

Hey. Oh. He'll be the only James Bond minifig with abs. Well, they did make Lego Christian Bale because I know that they made the Christian Bale because I know that they made like a, um, a set that had the Christian Bale version of Batman in Bain, which again, that's what kids were clamoring for. was a Dark Night Rise's, you know, Lego set. But, but no, I think it's of all these different, and we kind of mentioned this before, but either studios were coming to Lego or Lego was going to the studios

and maybe it was a bit of both as time went on. But, you know, what other company in the world, essentially at this point has all the brands that Lego has attached themselves to, from, you know, DC to Marvel, to Star Wars, to Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, You know, all these different products, they're basically studio agnostic in terms of what they'll do and they sell and people love them. We haven't talked about them because, you know, I guess timing concerns, it wouldn't really be able to get through all of them.

But after Lego Star Wars, they moved on to another Lucasfilm property, which was, of course, Lego Indiana Jones, which people were, I think, calling for before they announced it. It was more of us to open secret. Of course they're going to do Indiana Jones. It's three movies. Only three, not four. Soon to be five. Oh, yeah, I forgot that was happening. Oh, life is horrible, isn't it?

This one has Matt Mickelson. So back again, you know, Lishie from playing. Oh, I wish. No, it's funny. I think it's Toby Jones isn't there as well. You know, it's, it seems as if they're doing a decent job recognizing the mistakes that Crystal Skull will say made. We'll just leave it at that.

It is what it is. I think Crystal Skull is best watched in Lego form. as part of Lego Winnii and Jones 2, The Adventure Continues, where they managed to ring 15 individual levels out of that movie. I don't know how they managed it, but, you know, it's better than watching it, I suppose. I don't even hate that movie that much. It's just, it seems like it might not be the best use of your time. It's like if they made like Lego, like RAPD or something, it's sort of on that level.

Like, just making a Lego version of a movie that people aren't really that bothered about. I was going to suggest Lego The Matrix, but then what do you? do for reloaded? Like, what do you do? That's rated R. Can't touch it. Oh, yeah, of course. But maybe resurrections this Christmas if they actually finish it on time. But no, I mean, it was funny when I saw in the notes that you had Lego Indiana Jones came out in 2008, which I thought, well, that's the year the Crystal Skull came out. And so, you know, surprise, surprise, the wonderful world of corporate synergy where, again, like you said, it was an open secret. They were going to make that game. But

obviously they either didn't have access to or they weren't given enough time to make Crystal Skull related material. And so like you said, it focuses on the three movies everyone loves and it follows the same formula. And I can't recall, was there like a true hub world in Lego Indiana Jones or was it kind of still like a hallway of doors and you just kind of walk into them? It was the college.

I believe it was the college from Last Crusade, Barnett College, but it was essentially just a hallway. As the series went on, the hubs got more and more. elaborate until they were essentially cards of open worlds which I think really missed the point of what made those games so good which was the gamey division of

sort of six levels per movie even like Lego Batman which was based on the original story more or less had 15 levels like five per chapter but then when you finished it you unlocked the villain's side which was 15 more levels which is honestly a vaguely equivalent to unlocking the bonus worlds in Mario 3D land

That's how good it was. It was like your game is finished and you've only done half of it. I love stuff like that. And that's a very strong example, I think. Can you talk a little bit about the villain stories in Batman? Like, is that the same content just kind of remixed or is it something entirely new? Now, it's been a long time since I played that. But my memory is that you're essentially doing the same locations, but the levels are different

because they've remixed sort of the obstacles and stuff. plus the villains if memory serves they divided they divided the villains up into like three teams each of whom were doing part of a plan and there is stuff that would say happen in the Batman side that wouldn't be explained until you got to the villain's side and it would be like oh I see

the reason why this happened is because Clayface did this or like whatever other Batman villains arrive my mind is emptied of all of them the joking one what's his name again the guy does the jokes I don't have a clue Joaquim Phoenix I think yeah that's the one

yeah but it's interesting that they took that approach with nothing to sort of base it on other than just the general Batman I guess sort of ethos because it was their kind of trial run for Lego Batman 2

which was their first open world fully voiced new plot DC superheroes kind of experience and it was probably for my money the last time I really loved one of these games. I'm not, now the ones afterwards, I'm not going to say they were poor,

but as we've discussed, they did go in a sort of more bloated direction, a more corporateish direction, I guess. I wasn't as far as them after that. It's funny, you know, looking at, you know, I know we're only going to talk about a handful of them today, but it's interesting to see

kind of, you know, I'm not a video game designer, obviously, and but seeing the evolution, you can almost see the thought process that goes into each iteration, and especially when they come out in such quick succession, we're talking about, I mean, this era, you know, what, 2005 and then 2006, seven, eight, you know, Lego Harry Potter comes out in 2010, Lego Batman's 2009. So it's almost like you can see the ideas evolving quickly, you know, as each one goes into production, they say, okay, let's make the hub, like you said,

Stuart, let's make the hub its own thing. Okay, what else can we do in the hub? Let's make it its own kind of explorable world with secrets behind doors. And then it just keeps expanding and expanding and expanding. And obviously, sometimes that works out really well. And sometimes, like with, you know, Lego Harry Potter, when Hogwarts becomes its own massive maze and you can't keep track of anything and they have to add ghosts that tell you where to go, you know, it eats its own tail to a certain. Yeah, I think that was the first one that did that.

If you got lost, it would just start. showing you where they go, like, look, that you need to follow these ghost studs or whatever it was. My issue with, I mean, I remember playing that one, and that, I remember very vividly how if you wanted to break everything, which you're pretty much encouraged to do, you were going to be in each individual room for something like 10 minutes, just individually casting a spell on everything in the room and then smashing it, and then maybe casting another spell on it once you've smashed it. And it starts to feel like work after a point. that's that when these games don't aren't delivering to me they feel like busy work when when you get one of these um break everything kind of rules it's there is the argument again that is just like don't do that you don't need to do that it's just an optional thing but i guess when you're so encouraged to do so and at the end of each level you're going to get this kind of here's all the things you fail to do you failing failure that does kind of for me personally it incentivizes me to try and ring as much I can out of it. And I almost feel like they went overboard with trying to please by put in so many things to interact with that really aren't all that interesting. Plus, it doesn't help that the Harry Potter world is very, very boring to me. It's just a school. I don't want

to go to school. But the toilet's haunted, which, you know, that wasn't the case of my school. There were bad things happening in that toilet, but it wasn't haunted. I mean, I don't know if my toilet is haunted. I wish it was. That would be cool. But, you know, do you hear crying in there at night, and if it's not you. Oh, no, it's just my own. Yeah. No, but I think, you know, you hit on something, too, which is, you know, the way that the early games worked, where you, you know, like we said before, kind of like a hallway, and you go into a door and start episode one, go into a door, you would start episode two.

And by the time it got to, I know Lego Indiana Jones 2, which I never finished or even kind of got beyond the opening sequences. And then certainly by Lego Harry Potter, getting to the levels themselves was a chore. I mean, like, they kind of blend it into the, the hub world in a way that you couldn't tell, am I supposed to be collecting things yet? Or has it actually, as the movie started, or what am I doing? Yeah. Which, you know, to Jeremy's point, these games were inherently built to be accessible.

And suddenly you're making them inaccessible to, you know, younger audiences. And we've already established that these games aren't Dark Souls, therefore Bob Mackey's not going to play them. So at that point, what do you do? Yeah, I think, from my perspective, the absolute pinnacle of the Lego games is still Lego Star Wars Complete Saga, because you've got the absolute surplus of content there, you've got two whole games, six whole whole, movie's worth of content plus bonus stuff on top of that. But it presented in the most accessible possible way. You know, six doors, behind each of those doors, five more doors for the levels, means you can jump in and jump out, change movies if you want to, if you're like, I'm a bit bored of the fact of the clones because it sucks. I'm going to go and jump

into a new hope for a bit. You can do that. You know, they throw in all the vehicle levels and they overhauled all of them. So the pod race was no longer complete and total garbage. It was just an exceptional game. And I feel like after that, while they weren't bad games, there was definitely a sense of like they've peaked and it's just sort of diminishing returns now. They seem to put out so many of them that

like nobody ever remembers they did Lego the Incredibles. I only just remembered they did Lego the United. I just found out about that, you know, reading up for this episode. Yeah. I had no idea. Who knew? They did Pirates of the Caribbean as well. It's a mystery to everyone. Yeah. I think

you know, each one, at least they tried, they threw everything they could at the wall and saw it stuck. And sometimes they would iterate on a good idea. And then sometimes they would abandon good ideas, you know, for really no apparent reason. And I know, you know, just looking, I think you had mentioned before that, you know, when they released, I don't know if it was the original, yeah, so they released the original trilogy, then the complete saga. And in the complete saga, they kind of iterated on the level design, like they made them a little longer or they added sort of like 3D kind of isometric, um, I know an attack of the clones, they made like a gunship level where you were flying over a geonosis, I think, or something like that.

Yeah, the existing vehicle levels got overhauled to be good instead of garbage, which was nice of them. And I see now in the trailers for Skywalker Saga, they've added like kind of a Cures of War cover mechanic level. Again, because everything needs that. That's what everyone means. Yeah, I mean, they should add to Tetris. I don't understand why you can't have cover mechanics and something like that. But kudos to them. they sit down, they think, what can we do to make this game different?

Different sometimes is good. Different sometimes is bad. And that's just the way it's always been with them. And honestly, I don't know what they've, I know they've been focusing all their efforts on Skywalker Saga for a game that's been delayed now for two plus, yeah, two plus years. And they announced another delay this week. I don't think they published a game now in probably two years, maybe more than that. I'm not sure. I think the last one was DC supervillains.

and that was ages ago. I think you're right. And they don't make anything but the Lego games at this point unless I'm missing something. No. I mean, there is Lego World or Lego Creator or something on those lines that's currently running, which is like I guess their rival to Minecraft,

which is perverse almost when you think about it. But other than that, no, it's just TT working on these Lego titles, is my understanding. I wanted to flag up because no one else is going to. They also made handheld versions of a lot. of these games for Nintendo handhelds like GBA and D.S. And now, variously, they're not great. The Game Boy Advanced versions of these kind of isometric takes that don't work.

But once you get to Lego Indy 2 on the DS, they're being made by the studio T.C. Fusion at the time, who I believe have now merged with full T.C. and become one huge studio. But they were surprisingly accomplished at that point. The DS version of Lego Harry Potter is a kind of bespoke, Again, isometric touchscreen game that really reminds me of old British microcomputer games and therefore it warms the cockles in my heart. Is that a phrase?

I don't even know. I think it's cockles, yes. Yes, the cockles that warms them. So I just wanted to shout those out because there ain't no one else going to. Actually, just because you mentioned it, if I'm not mistaken, isn't Traveler's Tales a British developer? It is, yeah, they are a British developer. Yeah, I forget where exactly they're based, but somewhere in England, it's a mystery. They're out there somewhere.

Randomly, I should probably have disclosed this at the beginning, but my name is in the credits of one of these games, just in the special thanks for no reason, because I asked my friend who works, might to put me in there because it would be fun. I didn't actually work on it in any way, but I should have disclosed that because now I've gone and done a big old games journalism. Wow, conflict of interest, my God. Yeah, exactly. I should have said, I should have refused to do this. and now I've just destroyed my reputation well that about wraps it up for this podcast yeah it does we have a tiny bit of mail

have we got time to do the mail or are they letters going to have in the big burning bin okay yeah so this one of the mail we're going to read them to you now yeah so this one is from Dave Bollmer hello yes

some of the Lego games have been games I've enjoyed, in particular during an unusually bad flare-up of, for hip a reason, we'll say this out loud, a medical issue. I passed the time by playing the DS version of Lego Star Wars. And here you go, Stuart. As a result of this, there are several music cues from the film's wonderful score that still bring to mind very specific aromas. I don't watch Star Wars very much anymore. Uh, excellent, Dave. Yeah, right. No, but he's, he's right in the sense that, you know, these games, because they had the full breadth of the Star Wars score, I mean, In my mind, I can still hear the digitized JVC, you know, versions of Super Star Wars.

The various themes are burned into my brain for better or for worse. But, you know, once these games have, you know, exactly the right score, exactly the right sound effects, and they are, for all intents of purposes, probably the best Star Wars games that have come out in 20 years, 15 years, 16 years for sure. But, no, I mean, maybe that's something to just to say, and I know we've got more mail. The Traveler's Tales have done a very better than average job with these games. They are not going to win Game of the Year. They are buggy at times. They are frustrating, for sure.

In particular, I remember a sequence from the first Lego Star Wars game where you're on the beach and Kashik. And the enemies repeat, like there's a trigger point where they just keep pouring out of the jungle. I remember that sequence as well. And to get a particular mini kit, you had to kill everything and then grab it. And for whatever reason, the timing of those enemies was so close that it was just a controller, you know, throwing frustration of like, I just need to get that extra step. Stop showing up out of the jungle. So they've gotten better at times. But I think that, you know, they're for a studio that has done, you know, kind of yeoman's work on this stuff. Good for them. They've done really a solid work. I'd say even the ones I don't like are fine. Like I can't really call them bad. They're like six out of ten. You know, and that's, you know, and that's, above average. We've got one more letter. Should I read this one out? What do you say? Jeremy, did you want to read this one out?

I will let you do that. Oh, thanks. Okay, right. Here we go. This one's from Sabrina TV band, which is a really cool name. Dear Retronauts, I was about seven years old when I first played the original Lego Star Wars. I haven't played it in years, but I do remember it having a very high level of competence

relative to other licensed games from around that time. I was a kid who spent their money poorly quite often, and I owned many terrible licensed games. But the first two Lego Star Wars games actually made for an enjoyable co-op experience. The fact you could attack your friend deliberately and steal their studs made for an interesting dynamic. That being said, the appeal of Lego games in general quickly wore off. I never bought the later ones. Lego Star Wars somehow made sense in a way that Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman didn't, perhaps because Star Wars is one of Lego's oldest

licenses. I also think I may have just aged out of the simple gameplay by the time Lego Indiana Jones came out at the ripe age of 10. Now, at the age of 10, I hated everything. I think. So I can relate to that. I was just not having any of it, basically. I think, to Sabrina TV band's point about how Lego Star Wars felt made sense in a way that the later games didn't. Honestly, I think part of that is Lego Star Wars, you had a combat mechanic that involved blasters and a projectile weapon. And the lightsaber is basically swinging a club around for the game's purposes. But Lego Indiana Jones, he doesn't really use a gun very often. And in the movies, it's usually for almost comedic effect, whether he's, you know, shooting someone in the

market or shooting three Nazis on top of a tank. But by and large, he uses his fists, which the combat in Lego games is fine to use, you know, stewards term. But, you know, hand-to-hand combat is not, you know, it does not succeed in that regard. And yeah, I guess that brings us to the end of Lego-focused episode of Retronauts, unless anyone has any final thoughts on the Lego games, which I feel like we've dug into quite thoroughly. I feel like we've, you know, constructed like a model, a Lego model, a quite nice sort of overview of these games.

But any final thoughts from anyone? No. You know, I guess if we ever revisited this, we could talk about techniques. and Ninjago, but that's, that's all I know. Yeah, I was, I was going to pitch that, actually. We did like a whole Bionicle episode, like two hour, a barnacle episode, but yeah. Amazing.

A lot of you just talking by yourself, I think, unfortunately. Yeah, basically going, I don't know what Bionicle is. I'm sorry, I'm on Wikipedia right now. Let's just read it. Right. You just imagine Chris Pratt's voice. Just remember the movie. No, thank you.

That's the important part. I will not remember his voice. I will not. I refuse. But he's Starlord. and Emmett and everything else now and the lead of Jurassic World what can't Chris Pratt do?

Oh yeah, they did Lego Jurassic World and then he was also the Lego movie guy, perhaps some nepotism at work in the old Lego group there. Hmm, yeah. So, hey, but Jeff, if you would like to, where can we find you and your endeavors on the internet were we to seek them out, which we surely will?

Oh, well, thank you. No, so as I said, unfortunately, As a lawyer, you can come, if you need labor and employment work, I'm a defense lawyer. But, you know, you can find my random thoughts on Twitter at Raptor Akley, R-A-P-T-O-R-A-C-K-L-A-Y. And beyond that, you know, my thoughts are basically expressed to my wife who rolls her eyes, and it'll be nice to have other folks roll their eyes as well. Okay. Now I'm thinking it might be most sensible to get my stuff out of the way, because then

Jeremy, you'll be able to describe the Patreon and that sort of thing. Unless you would prefer that I describe the Patreon. I would say, why don't you go for it? Okay. First of all, I tell you what, Jeremy, where can we find you in the meantime? Oh, you can find me on the internet. I'm always there. I never log off.

You can find me on Twitter's Gamesbyte, doing Retronaut stuff here at Retronauts, and on YouTube, doing videos, also about old games. to run games also doing stuff about all the games. It's like a recurring motif. I don't know. They're very well, I must say they are tremendous videos and I recommend everyone check them out. I'm Stuart Chip. You can find me at Stupacabra on Twitter. I also do other podcasts, which I will very briefly list. I do the Dillcast where we review every single episode of Dillba. It's horrible. I do anime chat where I review every single episode of Anime X, which I also hate. I don't do any podcasts about things I like apart from Retronauts. This is a real,

thing for me. But if you've enjoyed this podcast, Retronauts, you can become a supporter thereof by going to patreon.com forward slash Retronauts. And for, now see, this is the difficult part, because on my end, it's all in pounds. Ah, well, on the American side, it's $3 is the basic buy-in. And that gets you a seven-day advance on each episode, I believe it gives you early access. and then these... With a higher bitrate quality than on the public feed and no advertisements

or advertisements if you prefer. Well, that just sounds like a tremendous experience. I'd recommend everyone get on that right now, to be honest. Of course, if you're already listening to this one seven days earlier, you have done it. Thank you. The next tier up is $5. Yes, four pounds per month if you live in the UK, instantly. And that'll get you

Patreon exclusive episodes, two of those per month, I believe. And is that the tier? that gets you the um this week in retro columns as well absolutely and mini podcasts yes mini podcast and this week in retro columns written by um diamond fire which are excellent and as mentioned come with uh an audio version which is um read by zem as well and of course that helps us to make more and more podcast and content for you which is what we all want we all want that it's a mutual desire that that tier also includes discord access which is a recent addition but a good one

It's, you know, chatting with people who also like old video games and podcasts about such. They're all very friendly folks, indeed. And you might even catch us in there. You might catch me in there making a complete fall of myself. No comment. So, yeah. I think I'm going to visit more often now. Okay.

Well, yeah, that's, I'm not sure how we normally end these. Do we just say the end? Is that how we do it? You can end it however you like. You can say, I'm done now, goodbye, or you can make a punchy joke, or you can just let it kind of fizzle. I don't know. Okay, well, I'm going to let go of this podcast that meant let go. It's Lego, my ego.

You know, that's an American thing, right? It is. I don't know. Yeah. So I'm going to let go of you listeners and be sure to tune in for the next episode. And I've made it through this whole thing without making a joke about studs. So, you know, you're welcome. I used to think maybe you love me

Now baby I'm sure And I just can't wait till the day When you knock on my door Now every time I go for the mailbox It's got to hold myself down Because I just can't wait till you like me You're coming around. Now I'm walking on sunshine.

Whoa. I'm walking on sunshine. Whoa. I'm walking on sunshine. Whoa. And time to feel good. Had it. All right now.

It's time to feel good. I said, I'm saying, I'm saying a good life. It's time to feel good. Thank you.