WIRED 2015: Next Generation is our annual event dedicated to inspiring young minds, where innovators aged 12 to 18 years old gather at London’s Tobacco Dock for talks, hands-on workshops and Q&As. For more from the event head to our WIRED NexGen Hub.
The Lego video games are popular. Very popular.
In fact, 100 million copies have been sold worldwide -- enough, were they stacked on top of each other in DVD boxes, to reach seven hundred miles high.
The first reason why the Lego games are so insanely popular, Mark Warburton, game producer at TT Games told WIRED NextGen at London's Tobacco Dock, is that "Lego is just ingrained in our society and its not going anywhere soon".
So how do its designers translate the love of that toy into a video game people actually want to play? The first step is what games designers can bring to the concept, he said. "It helps us to be bigger fans of these brands [Marvel Avengers, Back To The Future, Portal] every time," Warburton explained. "We make the games that we as fans want to see. What we have to do is marry those two things together -- the Lego and our fandom and put it together into a game."
Notably, Lego Dimensions, the latest Lego game and the first toys-to-life venture by TT Games, includes Doctor Who Lego. Unfortunately for TT Games, there was no Doctor Who Lego when they started working on the game. So to get it in the game the modellers for TT had to start from scratch, building something that is up to Lego's standards and looks as good as it possibly can be.
Of course there have been many Lego games in the TT series so far -- with more to come in 2016. So how does TT keep the quality up, while still sticking to the core of the series' action-based and collectibles-heavy action.
The key to keep making high-quality Lego games, for TT, is to stay fans. "The games have to be fun, and at the end of the day what is more fun than Lego?"
Of course the key of Lego is that you can do anything in your imagination with the physical toys. So, are TT ever going to make a Lego game where you can just do whatever you want, one young fan asked? In fact, they are: Lego World, Warburton said, which is currently in Alpha on PC, is the closest that Lego games have come so far to a fully anarchic Minecraft-style game.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK