lol username Posted July 25, 2018 Share Posted July 25, 2018 A while back I was browsing Polycount and came across a thread posted by an artist talking about getting their first gamedev job, working on LEGO Universe. One of the replies was from a guy named Mike Rusby, who mentioned that his first job was also working on a LEGO game. Curious which game it was, I clicked the link to his website in his signature. http://mikerusby.com/misc.html If you scroll down a bit there, you'll see some LEGO character models labeled "lego football Blitz games 2002". I also came across his Flickr gallery, which has the same image, and a second one, both labeled 2003 this time. https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikerusby/3258838335/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikerusby/3259670852/ I did more googling but couldn't find anything else about a LEGO game made by Blitz, except a little more from Mike on another website, which just said he worked there as a texture artist from 2002-9 to 2003-2. LEGO Football/Soccer Mania, by Silicon Dreams, was released in June 2002. This game was in development after that one. So, being curious what happened to this game, I dropped Mike an email, and he was kind enough to shed some light on it. He just remembered it being called LEGO Football. My guess is it would have gotten a more unique name by launch to differentiate it between LEGO Football/Soccer Mania, but who knows. He vaguely remembered someone telling him that there'd been a previous football/soccer LEGO game before theirs, but wasn't sure. So the team was at least aware of Football/Soccer Mania, but probably not taking heavy inspiration from it or trying to make a direct sequel. He said "The game was ok to play, the animations that my colleague did were superb." He has a CD with some of the 3D models somewhere; "a wild west saloon, cowboy and indian village amongst other things." He said he'd try to track it down but hadn't seen it in a while. It sounds like that while the game was intended to have a variety of themes, all he really remembered (if not all that existed before cancellation) was wild west themed. In the wild west section you played on top of a train, went through a fort and red indian village, had to kick the ball at rattlesnakes etc. It was an old wild west train, the kind with an iron cowcatcher on the front. There was also a big wild west town with a saloon, which you played in. Meanwhile... https://www.gamespot.com/articles/qanda-lego-star-wars-producer-jonathan-smith/1100-6165669/ Quote GSUK: Were there any ideas that came before it? ("it" being LEGO Star Wars, which began development at some point in 2003) JS: We made a game called Lego Soccer Adventure, which never came out. It was a test. We started thinking about things that we could do with Lego that had never been done before. The game was basically a series of fantasy environments, and you kick the ball at things to make things happen, avoid animated creatures and tackles from enemies. You never die in the game; you just lose the ball. Dying and then having to go back and do things again and again and again, that's something that we decided we wanted to do differently. In the end, however, we just couldn't justify the amount of money it would cost to make that game. I sent this interview to Mike, who said he had a weird feeling it wasn't the game he worked on at Blitz. Given the incredibly close timing, though, I think it's likely there's some connection here. LEGO has a long history of cancelling or rejecting games at one studio, then trying again with a similar (if not the same) concept at another studio. (As you can read there, even LEGO Football/Soccer Mania has such a history; DDI pitched the idea but LEGO went with Silicon Dreams to actually make it, years later). They've done it in more recent years too. Honestly, I'd imagine it's fairly common practice in game development, beyond just LEGO... But why didn't they just go with Silicon Dreams again? I don't know, but it seems they might have considered it... https://www.rockraidersunited.com/topic/5916-contact-with-atd/ Quote Were there any other Lego games that were cancelled; yes, several in various stages of production (more Lego Soccer, etc.) – I think the cancellations were a result of less-than-stellar sales of the games, leading to the closure of the digital group that handled them. The break-out title was TT’s Lego Star Wars in 2005… ATD was a sister studio to Silicon Dreams; both owned by Kaboom. It'd make sense for one of ATD's co-founders to know of Silicon Dreams's projects - or perhaps they'd know even if it weren't a Silicon Dreams project, just due to working directly with LEGO. tl;dr: Another LEGO Football/Soccer game was attempted, possibly multiple times. It never worked out. Oh well. Brightfall, FeebTube, eagleeyedan and 2 others 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eagleeyedan Posted July 25, 2018 Share Posted July 25, 2018 Would have been interesting to have had a LEGO version of different sports similar to the old Backyard Sports games from Humongous Entertainment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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