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Canceled LEGO Racers... 4?


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Found this while looking up LR2/Drome Racers devs...

http://www.simon.mooli.org.uk/AF/article/commercial.html

When I joined Attention to Detail in 2002 they were developing a racing game for toy brick company Lego, to follow up Lego Racers 2, a PC and PS2 title which they'd recently finished. Drome Racers was known as Lego Racers 3 during development, and themed to tie in with some techie Lego cars.

I arrived too late to make a significant contribution to the PC or PS2 code, but got involved in the conversion to the Power PC based GameCube. Ports of the game for this machine and Xbox were scheduled to follow the PC and PS2 versions, and benefited from extra development time.

The sad thing about Drome Racers was that - due to publisher interference - it was a more playable game six months before completion than it was by the time Lego deemed it fit for release. The management of Lego games seldom lasted as long as it took to complete a console title, and drew from a pool of people with little experience of the games industry, which meant frustrating changes in direction that did not improve the eventual product.

Despite this, and the problems of the Kaboom group, the Xbox and Nintendo ports were finished on time, and the Gamecube version of Drome Racers briefly appeared in the UK top 10 for the platform.

A more ambitious project, Lego Racers 4, was canned after substantial development effort. This was technically interesting as the design called for streaming of the entire game world from DVD, allowing much larger and more intricate play area than earlier Lego games, or most console titles at the time. The team involved went on to work on Ion Runner, of which more later...

More info on Ion Runner down at the bottom of the linked page.

Also, I've never seen the Xbox version of Drome Racers in the wild... It's either really rare or actually never got released for some reason or another. I've only seen box art.

I'm gonna try to contact this guy and see if he has any more info.

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Is this "Racers 4" the same as the "Racers 3" that was cancelled, or something separate?

There was no canceled "Racers 3". Unless you're thinking of that canceled 2009 Racers game we know nothing about - which was somewhere around six or seven years after this canceled "LEGO Racers 4".
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So this would be the mysterious LEGO Racers CC, then? I was recently thinking about it, funny that more information should pop up now.

 

I find it extremely interesting that Drome Racers and its cancelled successor were initially envisioned as additions to the LEGO Racers series, given the major stylistic differences. I wonder if that means there were some ideas floating around for continuity ties between the first two games and the third. Maybe Rocket would have literally been Rocket Racer, rather than just a reference to the latter.

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So this would be the mysterious LEGO Racers CC, then? I was recently thinking about it, funny that more information should pop up now.

 

I remember seeing an ad for that in a catalog way back in 2004. That's probably what this 'LEGO Racers 4' turned out to be, and then was scrapped.

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So this would be the mysterious LEGO Racers CC, then? I was recently thinking about it, funny that more information should pop up now.

say-what.gif

GO GO GADGET BRICKFACTORY.INFO

100.jpg

Anybody wanna translate this? Or is there an English version already, somewhere?

Wait... These catalogs are from 2004. ATD died in 2003. What gives?

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Anybody wanna translate this? Or is there an English version already, somewhere?

 

There is an English version somewhere. I saw the same ad back in 04, it was saying something about how you could build your own cars, if I remember correctly. Don't have the catalog anymore though (I don't think).

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In the absence of an English version, here's a quick translation:

 

 

High Voltage and Action with the New LEGO Video Games

 

Build 'em... control 'em... and win!

 

Race in the cars of your dreams. Challenge the very best and race across the most incredible terrains and courses. Experiment with the design of your car and try out your changes on the test track. For off-road racing or on-road - you can build the car of your dreams here.

 

Launches: Christmas 2004

 

Begin with a standard chassis

Pop [on?] the tires...

Put a motor on...

Throw a couple of dazzling headlights on!

 

Test and tune all the different track types.

Early in the morning at the start...

In the changing twilight...

And in the middle of the night!

 

EDIT:

 

Wait... These catalogs are from 2004. ATD died in 2003. What gives?

Hm. Maybe the production was handed over to some other developer?

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So basically, there's the car building/testing aspect of LEGO Racers, what appears to be the large open world concept from LEGO Racers 2, and the awesomeness, nostalgia, and style of Drome Racers.

AKA my dream LEGO Racers game.

And it was never released.

:|

Wait, what about the little boxes with captions, on the left side and bottom of the ad?

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grappigegovert

Full translation:

Excitement* and action with the new LEGO video games

Build it ... drive it ... and win!

Race in the car of your dreams. Challenge the best of the best and race on the most unbelievable terrains and tracks.

Experiment with the design of your car and try your changes on the test track. For off-road racing or drawing trails in the asfalt - here you can build the car of your dreams.

Launch: Christmas 2004

The text under the smaller pictures translate to:

Begin with a standard chassis

pump up the tires ...

put a motor in it ...

put some eye blinding headlights on it!

Test and tune on all different track types.

at the start early in the morning ...

in the deceptive twilight ...

and in the dead of night!

*('hoogspanning' actually means 'high voltage', but 'spanning' means excitement and 'hoog' means high, so it's super exciting)

EDIT:

Double ninja'd? I need faster internet

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EDIT:

Double ninja'd? I need faster internet

Your translation is much clearer than what I was able to manage with Google Translate, though. Thanks!

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I've been talking with some ATD devs. LEGO Racers 4 never got beyond early technical work, and was never a playable game - this "LEGO Racers CC" thing isn't it. So we've actually got two separate LEGO racing games that were canceled within a few years of each other, plus the canceled 2009 game we know even less about... Oy, LEGO, what do you have against racers?

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  • 1 month later...

I remember seeing this CC game in a few catalogues like 10 years ago, I was looking forward to it but never realised it was cancelled. I completely forgot about it until I saw this thread :P

Interesting to see there was another "racers 4" game planned. Do we know whether it would have been a DR thing or would it have gone back to the classic kart racing proper LEGO stuff?

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  • 2 years later...
5 hours ago, lordtobi909 said:

I wonder if the 2003 LEGO Racers 4, the 2004 LEGO Racers CC and the 2009 LEGO Racers: The Video Game are related in any way. It is very possible that LR4 was renamed LRCC after ATD died, but the gap to LR:TVG is to far, isn't it?

Yeah. Not to mention, once you look at what we have of Racers CC vs TVG, it becomes pretty clear there isn't any direct relationship between the two.

 

Terrev said upthread that LR4 never existed beyond early technical work before ATD went under - it could be that LEGO passed along whatever little ATD had done to the CC devs (I guess? they did that with Krisalis and SD for LI2, right?), but without more information its impossible to say for certain.

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When I showed the Racers CC catalog scan to an ATD guy, he said "No that's definitely not LR4". Take that as you will.

 

Quote

Terrev said upthread that LR4 never existed beyond early technical work before ATD went under - it could be that LEGO passed along whatever little ATD had done to the CC devs (I guess? they did that with Krisalis and SD for LI2, right?), but without more information its impossible to say for certain.

 

LR4 was canceled because its main feature was a massive open world streamed from the disc, and LEGO and/or EA weren't confident in the tech for that. And all that existed of LR4 was work on that tech they weren't confident in, so there wouldn't have even been anything from LR4 to give to another developer.

 

Putting any sort of connection between Racers CC and Racers The Video Game is beyond a massive stretch. There isn't a single tie between the two beyond "racing game involving LEGO that got canceled" (and with Racers CC, even the "involving LEGO" bit isn't that solid).

 

Unrelated - I'm pretty sure "Racers CC" isn't actually the name of it... Or, it has a hella weird logo design. There's a big empty gap between the LEGO logo and "CC" where it looks like more text should go. I'll bet whoever was putting that catalog together goofed, and there's black text there blending in with the background.

 

Also, lordtobi, the LEGO Interactive website used that logo: http://web.archive.org/web/20030401191911/http://www.lego.com/eng/interactive/default.asp More catalogs likely did as well.

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  • 4 years later...

I worked at ATD during this period, on all the published Lego games. Lego Racers 2 is obviously what it sounds like. Lego Racers 3 was actually Drome Racers. It was only called Lego Racers 3 for a very brief period, I only ever really knew it as Drome Racers. Lego Racers 4 never existed, it was always known as Drome Racers 2 internally. And yeah, it only ever had a pre-production phase and no code was ever written for it to my knowledge, though we did progress our internal engine tech in that direction which was eventually used in the uncompleted Ion Runner. 

I also did the port of Drome Racers from PC to XBOX. This was complete a few months before ATD closed, so I have no idea why it was never released by the publisher.

Edited by Rob Baker
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lol username
14 hours ago, Rob Baker said:

I worked at ATD during this period, on all the published Lego games. Lego Racers 2 is obviously what it sounds like. Lego Racers 3 was actually Drome Racers. It was only called Lego Racers 3 for a very brief period, I only ever really knew it as Drome Racers. Lego Racers 4 never existed, it was always known as Drome Racers 2 internally. And yeah, it only ever had a pre-production phase and no code was ever written for it to my knowledge, though we did progress our internal engine tech in that direction which was eventually used in the uncompleted Ion Runner. 

I also did the port of Drome Racers from PC to XBOX. This was complete a few months before ATD closed, so I have no idea why it was never released by the publisher.

Oh hey! Thanks for the clarification on internal names and stuff.

 

Yeah, Drome Racers XBOX still remains a bit of a mystery - a build of it turned up on a devkit a while back, but that's pretty much all anyone has ever seen of it. I've heard some people have gotten it booting up, all I've really tried personally is copy-pasting a car that was new in that version over to PC since the formats are identical.

 

Also, on an unrelated note - I've been playing GRIP a lot lately (quite a few of us on this forum have been actually), and very much enjoying it. Really feels like the culmination of what ATD was doing back in the day, brought up to such a higher level of polish. Thanks for your work! :) 

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