The Story of LEGO Universe
2020 has been a landmark year for a host of reasons I do not have the time or emotional energy to get into right now, all except for one: the 10th anniversary of NetDevil’s brick-based MMO, LEGO Universe.
As a kid and as an adult, I adored and continue to adore LEGO and The LEGO Group. LEGO.com was the first website I ever saved as a bookmark, and for a while it was even my homepage any time I’d open up my web browser. I’d played through a ton of the LEGO Media and LEGO Interactive catalog on PC, Playstation 2, and Gamecube — but I also had a handful of browser-based massively multiplayer online games that I’d regularly return to during the gaming sessions of my youth.
So when I learned that The LEGO Group was in the midst of developing a LEGO-themed MMO, I was beyond excited. And that’s what we’re here to talk about today, in this — the month of LEGO Universe’s 10th anniversary.
Pre-production
By 2010, The LEGO Group already had 15 years of published videogames under their belt. 15 years of first and third person action adventures, real time strategy games, sports simulators, puzzle platformers, racing games, and a handful of licensed properties to boot. So why had they waited so long to make an MMO? Well, according to LEGO’s former Director of Business Development Mark Hansen, the seeds that would become LEGO Universe were planted all the way back in the late 90s, during the first boom of LEGO-branded titles, but according to an interview with Gamasutra, “serious planning” for this theoretical online LEGO game wouldn’t begin until 2004, when The LEGO Group began actively seeking out partners for the project.
Of these potential partners was Auto Assault and Jumpgate Evolution developer NetDevil. Former NetDevil Creative Director Ryan Seabury told Wired that, “The LEGO Group approached us in 2005 with a very brief email, something along the lines of ‘would you be interested in working on an online world using LEGO?’. Seabury said that this email caused him to almost do a backflip out of his chair, and run to the other executives at NetDevil with the news. Seabury said:
“The first thing I thought of were all the positives. When you look at a property like LEGO, it’s almost universally recognized. It’s hard to think of a company with more positive recognition. The only complaint you hear is about parents stepping on bricks in the dark.”
Dozens of studios were approached by LEGO during this process, and eventually the decision was made to tap NetDevil for LEGO Universe, a decision Mark Hansen said was due, in part, to the studio’s pedigree, but also, NetDevil’s personality:
“Many of the studios we [The LEGO Group] went to said, ‘here’s the game we’re going to make for you’ — we didn’t want to hear the game they were going to make for us. LEGO’s been around 75 years — it’s not for [the studio] to rearrange what LEGO is.”
NetDevil’s willingness to work with LEGO instead of just for LEGO was key in their acquisition of the contract for LEGO Universe. And NetDevil wasn’t afraid to try new things during development of their games, a trait The LEGO Group admired. NetDevil had a tendency to push their development tools to their limits, even going so far as breaking the Havok engine on numerous occasions during development of their previous titles. Ryan Seabury recalled a time when the team had needed to call Havok’s support line to diagnose a problem with their engine — specifically a scene where the team at NetDevil was running some 34,000 individual objects. According to Havok support, Havok 1 had a 2,000 object maximum per scene. But the lessons learned in those moments were key, Seabury speculated, in why LEGO chose them to build LEGO Universe.
And internally, the announcement that LEGO had chosen NetDevil to create LEGO Universe could not have come at a better time. NetDevil and NCSoft’s automotive-themed MMO Auto Assault had just closed it’s servers little over a year after its release, which — though tragic in its own right, was doubly difficult for the team at NetDevil because, according to Seabury, the release of Auto Assault had been preceded by nine months of brutal crunch — all of which appeared to have been for nothing once NCSoft pulled the plug on Auto Assault’s servers.
But such a partnership with The LEGO Group had the chance of rocketing NetDevil to unprecedented levels of success. After all, LEGO Star Wars developer Traveller’s Tales was sold to Warner Bros. in 2007 for a reported $200 million. The opportunity was exciting. Seabury said that, “…we started building stuff, and everyone would walk by and… have a zillion ideas and you could just see the concept was so night-and-day in comparison with Auto Assault. With LEGO, you just say ‘imagine a LEGO universe,’ and people get excited. It just had that kind of energy.
And so 2005 then was a landmark year for LEGO videogame development, firstly because that’s when The LEGO Group first approached NetDevil about the development of LEGO Universe, but secondly, because of the release of another LEGO title: LEGO Star Wars, from UK-based TT Games.
The success of TT’s formulaic approach to LEGO’s licensed properties gave the team at NetDevil a template for systems they could put in their own game. Things like Quick Build and the symbiosis of LEGO bricks and more organic, true-to-life environments. But NetDevil had to overcome narrative hurdles not known by the developers at Traveller’s Tales, and had to create their own world for players to enjoy — not rely on already established franchises to attract fans.
“…the Traveler’s Tales games, like LEGO Star Wars and all of that — those are strong narrative games. You’re playing Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones and it’s fun, but it’s not you. ‘Why would I want to build in LEGO Universe?’ The answer has to be more than ‘It’s fun to build LEGO’ because that’s just not enough when it comes to a video game. Customizing yourself and putting your identity into that mini figure is the central point.”
And so the story of LEGO Universe’s universe began to form around the idea of collaborative play — collaborative play to save imagination. Seabury said that if you can “make your community bond … the creative possibilities open up from there, which leads to you having much more of an investment to stay in that world and continue building.”
And so the worlds of LEGO Universe leaned heavily into LEGO’s most classic product lines: City, Castles and Knights, Pirates, Space, and the budding genre of Ninjas. Lead Concept Artist Jim Stigall said that, “as organized as we all wanted to be as a development team, the whole process of creating LEGO Universe was very organic.”
But actually developing LEGO Universe was no simple task. The more I’ve learned about videogame development, the more I’m convinced that game devs are actual wizards, and the teams that make MMOs especially so. The systems upon systems that are necessary to create a fully functioning, always running, multiplayer world are so dense and complicated I can’t even begin to fathom everything involved with the creation of such a thing. But, I’ll do my best to summarize what I’ve been able to learn about the development of LEGO Universe.
Development
Though NetDevil’s previous MMO, Auto Assault was built on the Havok engine, the LEGO Universe team decided to use the Gamebryo engine, previously used on games like Civilization IV and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, to create their brick-based world. Code was imported into the Gamebryo engine using Scaleform, and used a number of programming languages, like ActionScript 2, C++, and Lua. A variety of other tools were used in the development of LEGO Universe, not least of which were a host of proprietary tools the team af NetDevil had developed over the years, but also versions of third party tools like Fork and Fmod, all modified in-house at NetDevil to suit the team’s unique needs — needs like the rendering the myriad LEGO bricks that would make up LEGO Universe’s digital world.
Now, to you and me, the untrained laypeople of the world, a LEGO brick might seem like a simple thing to create in a 3D engine. But the team at NetDevil found that that such deceptively simple shapes were far more taxing to create than anticipated:
“We thought about rendering LEGO bricks in real time, but they’re complicated… people think they’re just blocks, and they should be easy, but the level of detail with all the studs and the details on the other side… LEGO is uncompromising about how those need to look.
As a comparison, a two by eight LEGO plate brick, a very simple brick, is about twice the polygons of say, a World of Warcraft avatar.”
Not only that, but the way light plays with real-life LEGO bricks created fresh challenges for the team at NetDevil. Historically, one way game developers have dealt with lighting in their scenes is through a process called “ambient occlusion”, which is a shading and rendering technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting. But in recreating the plastic texture of real life LEGO bricks, the team at NetDevil developed a process called ambient inclusion to better recreate exactly how light would bounce off the tiny plastic pieces. Various versions of fan-made, brick-building software were already loose on the web, and in 2004 LEGO launched their own proprietary building software called LEGO Digital Designer, but none of these had gone as far as NetDevil to accurately recreate the conditions in which the human eye actually observed the everyday LEGO brick. Ryan Seabuty said that LEGO was “uncompromising about how those [the bricks] need to look.”
As part of The LEGO Group’s commitment to the team at NetDevil, LEGO supplied the devs with 10,000,000 LEGO bricks for the team to use in the physical conceptualization of LEGO Universe’s assets and systems — the largest single collection of LEGO bricks outside the Legoland parks and LEGO’s official headquarters in Denmark. This bounty of in-house LEGO bricks was doubly useful to the LU devs because one of the key design philosophies was that every LEGO-based asset in the game be able to be built out of real LEGO bricks. On this front NetDevil employed a number of full-time LEGO builders like Duane Hess to turn the art team’s concept artwork into real sets, and those sets in turn into digital versions of their real-life counterparts.
This too was an interesting challenge for the concept art team — which in the earliest days of development was just Lead Artist Jim Stigall and Senior Concept Artist Jerry Meyer:
“We did not want to meticulously draw every piece out in brick, obviously — and our master builder team did not desire that either as it took away from their own creative interpretation of the work. However, down the road and with further understanding of the limitations of the LEGO brick, we were able to add bits of detail, scale, and shape that would add LEGO style to our drawings and also help them to successfully be interpreted in brick.”
There is a great series of Animorphs style concepts from Stigall showing the process of turning a human model into a LEGO minifig. It’s oddly Cronenberg-esque, and I love it.
But creating these stylized, digital versions of LEGO’s many iconic bricks wasn’t the only challenge faced by the team at NetDevil. Across all the interviews, blog posts, and Twitter threads I read during my research for this script, two key development challenges appeared to be universally recognized throughout the LU team. The first of these hurdles was online interaction, or more specifically, how to handle and curate players’ experiences in LEGO Universe’s online world, knowing that the vast majority of players were going to skew much younger than those of already established MMOs like Runescape or World of Warcraft. LEGO Universe concept artist Mike Rayhawk told PC Gamer that:
“LEGO’s dedication to child safety superseded all concerns of production schedule or profitability, which was a principled move on LEGO’s part but it made some seemingly-straightforward parts of development really, really tricky.
LEGO is extremely sensitive about the safety of kids’ online interaction, to the point that implementing even the most basic social functions like in-game chat or friends lists became these kind of monumental tragic struggles that swallowed systems designers whole”
Historically, when given the ability to create shapes or draw lines — in any medium — certain shapes and lines have a, let’s say, universal allure to those who may wish to try out said shape creating and line drawing tools. Glass Bottom Games founder and former NetDevil graphics coder Megan Fox spoke of these universally alluring shapes from her Twitter account in 2015, saying:
“The moderation costs of LEGO Universe were a big issue in general. They wanted a creative building MMO with a promise of zero penises seen.”
But such a venture, when taking into account the millions of players LEGO Universe would eventually have, was not easy to automate. Human input was required in order to implement the stringent content moderation demanded by LEGO’s exacting quality standards. Megan said in her Twitter thread on the matter that making LEGO Universe’s “dong detection software” was “utterly impossible at any scale”.
The other hurdle the team needed to overcome — also related to the age of LU’s target demographic — was that these same young kids likely didn’t have the kind of powerful gaming rigs used by older MMO players. LEGO Universe needed to be built to play well on the weakest personal computers on the market. But this was less of a programming hurdle than a testing one. Ryan Seabury said that in-house at NetDevil it was more than a little difficult to actually find machines to test these low-end versions of LEGO Universe:
“We can’t even find the parts we want anymore; we have to piecemeal it out on the internet, and it costs more to put together one of our low-end machines than it does to make a super high-end Dell or something like that.”
Another unique challenge in the development of LEGO Universe was the game’s user interface, which created issues for the team at NetDevil all the way up to the launch of the game. Ryan Seabury said that the interface was undergoing constant iteration all the time, telling Gamasutra that, “It’s kind of like the [LEGO] blocks; you think it might be easy, because it’s such an iconic and established visual brand, but when you get down to the details of what it means in the context of an MMO, it was really quite a challenge.”
Stephen Calendar, who was hired mid-way through development to program LEGO Universe’s UI, called it “by far the most broken part of the game”. Upon arriving at NetDevil, Calendar spent a good deal of time reworking the salvageable UI code into something shippable, but noted that “When a system develops a bad reputation, it continues to be a usual suspect or scapegoat when new problems arise”.
But these are all just technical hurdles. What about the actual worlds of LEGO Universe? Well as we talked about earlier, LEGO’s licensed properties were off limits — at least at first — to the LEGO Universe team, so the devs at NetDevil needed to create their own worlds for players to build in and explore. NetDevil went straight to the source to make sure their playspaces would appeal to the widest swath of LEGO fans possible. Similar to the “Community Council” for the recent remaster of the Command & Conquer series, the team at NetDevil recruited a team of die hard LEGO fans to contribute and collaborate on the development of LEGO Universe, at first just in a conceptual/feedback capacity, but eventually handing over NetDevil’s actual development tools to this group of LUPs — or “LEGO Universe Partners”.
The idea here was twofold: firstly, that the team at NetDevil could get feedback from key stakeholders within the LEGO community; and secondly, to begin fostering the community-minded focus of LEGO Universe’s buildable worlds.
A key goal for the team at NetDevil was for LEGO Universe to not just be a game built by NetDevil, but built by fans. NetDevil co-founder Scott Brown said in a 2010 CES interview that at launch LEGO Universe might be 90% NetDevil content and 10% fan content, but down the line he hoped those numbers might flip as the community began to build new worlds and content for the game. But those dreams were still very far down the road.
At first, development on LEGO Universe was done in three-week blocks, where at the end of the block the team took stock of the previous three weeks of work and determined what would stay and what would go. And sometimes whole blocks of work were thrown out. In a profile on the studio, Denver independent magazine Westword recounted one such moment.
According to the profile, an early LEGO Universe level contained a number of LEGO skunks. In early North American playtesting, older players found the theme to be too childish for their tastes, which obviously wasn’t the ideal response to the level. But playtesting was also done in Europe, where kids didn’t even know skunks at all. NetDevil scrapped the whole level. But in addition to the kid testers and LEGO Universe Partners, the team at NetDevil was also in contact with the devs over at TT, even bringing them in every so often to playtest LEGO Universe themselves.
Now, an important milestone to bring up here is that midway through the development of LEGO Universe, NetDevil suffered an internal upheaval in the form of the company’s sale to California-based Gazillion Entertainment. Initially, the sale in-of-itself didn’t seem to do any harm to the development of LEGO Universe, as — from all the interviews I’ve been able to read — it seems like Gazillion was fairly hand off the development of LEGO Universe, opting to just let NetDevil and LEGO keep doing what they’re doing and eventually reap the fruits of their efforts. Initially. We’ll come back to Gazillion later.
Marketing
On June 7, 2007, The LEGO Group would formally announce the development of LEGO Universe — some two years after first approaching NetDevil with their plans for the brick-based MMO. Initial plans for the game’s launch were aimed for the fourth quarter of 2008, though that date would soon be pushed back to 2009, and then again to the game’s eventual 2010 release.
With LEGO Universe announced, the LEGO marketing machine was able to kick into high gear. In the mid-2000s LEGO had been dabbling with viral marketing campaigns, chief among them the 2006 Bionicle marking campaign, “Free the Band”. But LEGO had broader plans for LU’s marketing push — plans that warrant a little bit of a tangent into the historical archives of the world as it was in the early 2000s.
The use of satellite-based radionavigation has been used by the government since the late 1970s, and while we here in 2020 take things like Google maps and other such global-positioning-systems for granted, this technology really was not commonplace amongst civilians until the early 2000s, when US law shifted to allow the everyday American easier access to the nation’s wealth of navigational satellite data. GPS tech boomed amongst consumers in the years that followed, prompting many to experiment with the new technology and find creative ways of using the fancy new tech. One such experiment was geocaching.
Geocaching was a worldwide phenomena. People would hide little caches of goodies all over the world. Global coordinates to the cache, or to a clue that would lead to the actual geocache, were uploaded by users to various internet forums, and then folks from anywhere on the globe could find those coordinates and hunt down the scattered caches. Geocaching was treasure hunting for the 21st century, with the first ever geocache containing software, videos, books, money, a can of beans, and a slingshot. You never knew what you were going to find.
Also apparently the US global-positioning-system is “operated by the United States Space Force”, so that’s some neat 2020 trivia.
But geocaching was still a hot item in the late 2000s, and LEGO decided to get in on the fun with a special marketing campaign for LEGO Universe.
The Bradford Rant Institute for Cosmic Kinesis was a fictional scientific institution which, per the mysterious first postings on the Bradford Rant website in late 2009, had found and decrypted coordinates for several extraterrestrial LEGO pods. The first pod continued clues pertinent to the story of LEGO Universe, and fans were urged to check the website for updates and new coordinates. All in all, seven of these LEGO pods were hidden around the world, and once fans had collected all the pods and decoded all the clues contained within them, a new trailer for LEGO Universe was unlocked — featuring none other than the vocal talent of Sir Patrick Stewart. The trailer itself was created by longtime LEGO Group marketing collaborators Advance. A new trailer was released soon after alongside the formal gameplay reveal of LEGO Universe at CES 2010.
Once all these pods were discovered, focus shifted from Bradford Rant to a new promotion called “The Great Minifig Mission”, where players could complete tasks on the LEGO Universe website in order to help new minifigs gain entry to LEGO Universe. If you completed all the missions before a countdown timer on the site reached zero, your account was rewarded with a special cosmetic when the game launched.
LEGO Universe landed on the show floor at E3 2010 that summer, revealing more gameplay and trailers, and then it was just a matter of waiting for the game to launch.
Release
LEGO Universe was formally released to the public on October 26, 2010, though folks who pre-ordered the game had had access since October 8.
A great many press questions before the launch of the game revolved around the profit model LEGO Universe would pursue. Almost every interview I read with a dev or LEGO executive ended with a question about how the game was going to make money. At launch, LEGO Universe was sold for $40, with an additional $10 a month subscription fee. Various pricing models had been thrown around during development, including free-to-play with microtransactions — a model which had been gaining popularity in Asian markets but hadn’t quite gotten a foothold in North America and Europe — but the monthly subscription fee seemed like the safest bet to get parents on board. Ryan Seabury told Gamasutra that, “when it comes to parents, they really don’t like the nickel-and-dime effect; they’d rather pay once a month and have access to all the updates and upgrades and everything.”
LEGO Universe launched to generally favorable reviews from the big gaming publications, and everything seemed well and good with the game as the final months of 2010 ticked on.
But one by one in late 2010, all of NetDevil’s original founders would leave the company. Few of them ever spoke of the reasons for their departures, but Ryan Seabury did draft a letter (to be published on Kotaku.com) titled “I Will Never Make an MMO Again”. In this letter Seabury spoke vaguely of the reasons for his departure, saying they were “related more to cultural and ethical conflict with the corporate ownership” — the corporate ownership of Gazillion Entertainment.
Despite this changing of the guard, NetDevil and LEGO Universe soldiered on with interim President Stuart Moulder, sent in from Gazillion’s corporate offices. But as 2010 transitioned into 2011, further changes would continue to disrupt the LEGO Universe team. In February of 2011, LEGO purchased the rights to LEGO Universe from Gazillion Entertainment, planning to continue to support and develop new content for LEGO Universe — but with a fraction of the development staff, now rebranded as Play Well Studios. Between NetDevil’s Colorado offices and LEGO’s support teams in Denmark, over 100 employees were laid off after the sale. One of these employees was LEGO Universe programmer Stephen Calendar, who wrote that he was stunned to find himself on the chopping block.
Calendar speculated that once Scott Brown, Ryan Seabury, and the other NetDevil co-founders departed, it was only a matter of time before Gazillion cleaned house. The writing had been on the wall for some time. In early 2011 Gazillion had stopped matching 401k contributions, and during the first year of Calendar’s employment had given out no bonuses to NetDevil staff. They’d even attempted to reduce the company’s health insurance benefits. Calendar said that, “As employees, we often felt like it was only through the actions of the founders and pressure applied by LEGO that kept Gazillion fair and honest.”
The layoff occurred five days before the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference, and Calendar said that the days immediately following the layoffs were a mad dash for every affected employee to get out to San Francisco to begin shopping around their resumes.
With The LEGO Group at the helm of LEGO Universe, they — along with the remaining NetDevil devs restructured and rebranded as Play Well Studios — continued onward with further expansions to LEGO Universe. But as the months of 2011 rolled on, the price of LEGO Universe gradually and steadily dropped. I distinctly recall going onto the LEGO “Shop at Home” website during the time and remarking that the game disk was on sale for $20, down from the original $40 at launch. And I vividly remember noticing how soon the price cut occurred based on the release date of the game. I even remember texting a friend about it.
The price of LEGO Universe continued to fall until The LEGO Group announced on June 21, 2011 that the game would be going free-to-play, at least in part. The company’s press release said that in August of 2011 new players could experience two of LU’s Adventure Zones and one player property for free, with the rest of the game still walled off behind the game’s subscription model. And so, on August 15, 2011, a portion of LEGO Universe was made free-to-play, and the game disk price dropped to $0, itself becoming free to download.
In September of 2011, LEGO and Play Well introduced LEGO’s beloved Ninjago characters and world to LEGO Universe — an expansion that featured a jaw-dropping 100 new missions. Ninjago was LEGO’s most successful first-person IP after the runaway success of BIONICLE in the early 2000s, so surely the inclusion of these characters meant the game was on the up and up. And perhaps it was. LEGO revealed that near the end of 2011 the game was pulling in nearly 2 million players. But these late successes were not enough.
Closure
On November 4, 2011, LEGO announced that LEGO Universe would be taken offline; but the servers themselves wouldn’t close down until January 1, 2012, leaving a little time for fans to hop back in and enjoy the world one last time. Petitions were passed around hoping to save the doomed game, but eventually the time to power down the servers came and went, and LEGO Universe was no more. Fans collected themselves together in Nimbus Plaza one final time as the clock ticked down to zero, and they were all unceremoniously kicked back out to the login screen and greeted by the smiling LEGO Universe mascot Bob, never to log in again. Bob’s smiling here also feels oddly malicious under the circumstances.
But what had prompted LEGO to pull the plug on LEGO Universe, just when it seemed like it was building up steam?
LEGO concept artist Mike Rayhawk said that, “…everybody on the team has their private conspiracy theories about the real reason LEGO shut down the project right as it was getting its legs under it. I think LEGO management took a sober assessment of their own unfamiliarity with exactly what MMOs are and how they work, and realized that they couldn’t trust themselves not to steer the ship straight into the rocks.”
There was some speculation too that the recent, meteoric success of Minecraft had a part to play in LU’s demise — as parents were likely more amenable to the one time purchase fee of a product like Minecraft (which to many parents was mostly indistinguishable from LEGO anyway) rather than the subscription based service of a game like LEGO Universe.
Others still speculated that the tenuous relationship between new NetDevil owners Gazillion Entertainment and The LEGO Group must have played a part in the collapse of LEGO Universe.
Jesper Vilstrup, Vice President of LEGO Universe said that the game had, “not been able to build a satisfactory revenue model in our target group”, and it was for that reason that the game be shut down.
But perhaps, knowing how cautious and zealous LEGO was in creating a safe, online space for children to build and play in, that the sheer cost — financially and in man hours — of curating LEGO Universe’s massive library of user generated content, was too much for LEGO to bear. Looking back on the legacy of the game, Megan Fox said that she “expect[s] stories of the sunk costs gone into LEGO Universe are told to young LEGO execs at bed time, as cautionary tales to never try again.”
Legacy
And yet, in the years since LEGO Universe formal closure, LEGO Universe has lived on, both in the hearts and minds of fans of the game, but also in fan-made recreations of the game, like Darkflame Universe, a LEGO Universe server emulator begun all the way back in 2013.
In hindsight, I wish I’d played LEGO Universe more. I wasn’t in a place financially to afford the subscription fees on my own, and my parents certainly weren’t going to shell out an extra $10 a month so I could play with a digital version of something I had crates of in my room.
And though LEGO Universe was shut down in 2012, LEGO has not abandoned the idea of a LEGO-themed, online, multiplayer game. Funcom’s 2015 LEGO Minifigures Online is generally considered to be the spiritual successor to LEGO Universe, but Minifigures Online — launched as a free-to-play title, met the same fate as LEGO Universe, launching on June 29, 2015, and closing on September 30, 2016.
And TT Games’ 2017 LEGO Worlds — though not a persistently online game — does play very similarly to LEGO Universe, even sharing many of the same aesthetic qualities and building mechanics as NetDevil’s ill-fated MMO.
So maybe one day LEGO will crack the code of a kid-friendly, fan-fulfilling online game — but until then, we still have our memories of LEGO Universe.
