LEGO Creator LEGO Creator Dev Comments

[lol username]

I'm sure many people here have seen this video already:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srpXXSA-DnY

A kid and his dad playing LEGO Creator on September 7th, 2001... Happily building a house, turning it into a skyscraper, then blowing it up with a destructa-brick... Yeah.

Anyway, I was reminded of this video tonight while discussing the game with a friend, and noticed these comments on it, by the same person (a developer), somewhere around a year apart:

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Sqdrn1 5 years ago

I kinda fronted the development and deeply apologise for the interface! It bgab for an older age group and got a tad scrambled in the downshift. Many asked of easter eggs... but a lot of main functionality was never fully discovered. We gave parts intelligence and found they spawned behaviours never planned! PC/graphics cards struggled then but reinstalled today I suspect it would be very different. Later versions sacrificed build authenticity for game play. I love this video.

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Sqdrn1 4 years ago

So many innocent things with skyscraper elements in those days now seem strange. I once spent time in a major world airline's simulators. The first thing we did was an NY flight with a challenge to fly between/ through two towers... yes those very towers.... Did a child of a privileged family once enjoy that same benign innocent experience and drew from it a memory that would fuel an inspiration of horror? The coincidence is too great not to haunt...

On a related note, on October 15-16 2011, somebody constructed a pretty specific overview of the development of the entire series on Wikipedia. Here are the bits he/she added:

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Lego Creator was initially conceived of as an 'Evergreen' replication of the physical toy. Starting with the 'Town' range it would expand at each release with the addition of addition of further product themes. Functionality would also be enhanced with each 'content pack'.

Ultimately individual ranges remains independent and emphasis shifted to a play experience, with reduced emphasis on freeform construction. Originally it had been hoped that shear scale of unlimited bricks might offset the loss of tactile merit - but such hope was compromised by the computers of the day. Plans included being able to build content that could be seamlessly dropped into quite separate LEGO games. This was dropped as the complexity of doing so was further explored.

By Harry Potter the series had shifted far from the original premise of freeform LEGO construction. Instead the product moved toward a more limited build environment but with superior gameplay.

Perhaps the one aspect of the software that best replicated the physical toy was the simulated noise of 'rummaging' for a specific brick, a sound guaranteed to annoy parents and siblings watching TV.

... LEGO documented the means and and encouraged open editing of the sounds they (minifigures) made when bumping into others or in random chatter. Their default speech was a form of jibberish simplifying localisation.

In the original development concerns were expressed that the greatest fun came less from 'Creator' building values but from the 'destructra brick'. LEGO Creator in its first form used the Town content. Game play grew in emphasis in the subsequent Knights Kingdom and Harry Potter sequels and destruction diminished.

The flame bricks first included in Knights Kingdom originally turned into real animated flame effects when entering 'play mode' but concern that this encouraged playing with fire removed the feature prior to release.

Once 'game play' included arrows and other weapons, the ability for software implemention to hold to LEGO values became complex. The conflict is not unique to LEGO but they are perhaps the most globally recognised brand for positive play values.

Yes, yes, this is Wikipedia, home to many a load of BS (see below) - but given the details of what was written in this instance, this doesn't particularly smell of BS to me, it smells more like a dev or somebody else involved writing about the process the series went through. (Side note: There are no other edits to any articles listed under that IP, besides that batch of edits on the LEGO Creator article.)

Now for that BS - a previous edit to the Creator page claimed that it was to have a N64 port, but after looking into the magazine the edit referenced and edit history of the editor, it seems that either said editor has a bizarre sense of humor or he/she was editing Wikipedia while drunk. There seems to be no evidence for any of his/her claims anywhere - which included saying that LCKK was going to have PS1 and N64 ports, that LI2 had a N64 port that was forcibly canceled by a magazine in anger after reviewing it, and that DDI was "similar to Nintendo", all while sometimes including bizarre and vague insults at things. Ah, the internet!

[Cyrem]

So you mean to tell me on September 7th, 2001... they built a LEGO sky scraper and blew it up.... and 4 days later on the 11th actual attacks happened on 2 skyscrapers...... one moment whilst I wind-up some conspiracy theorists.