They say you should never meet your heroes. There's a reasonable case to be made for never visiting your favourite game studios, either – the ten-year-old me imagined Nintendo to inhabit some sort of magical palace, but in reality it's a grey building in the industrial outskirts of Kyoto. The only thing to distinguish Square-Enix's Tokyo office from any other in the city is the art on the walls.
Rockstar North, up in Edinburgh, at least has its own nice, nondescript sandstone building, but you've no chance of ever making it inside. Traveller's Tales studios resides in a very ordinary industrial block in Knutsford, near Manchester in the northwest of England. You wouldn't imagine anything as boisterous and funny as the LEGO games emerging from it.
The LEGO series inhabits a unique space in gaming – simple, accessible, kid-friendly, ever so slightly shonky, but somehow entirely charming. It's one of the only licensed franchises that anyone responds to with genuine goodwill. For my money, it's mostly down to the humour. LEGO games are good-natured parodies, able and willing to engage with their source material in a manner that no other licensed game ever has.
On a recent visit to Traveller's Tales, which is currently putting the finishing touches to LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 in time for its release on November 18th, I talked to series producer Philip Ring about the process of building a LEGO game: what makes them what they are, how are they made, and after so many years, where do the ideas keep coming from?
What Makes a LEGO Game?
Philip has been with the LEGO series since LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, working with every title since – and he agrees that humour is a big part of what makes these games work. "The biggest draw is the humour, and the fact that you're playing a franchise you understand," he reckons. "We get to parody things that you've seen. If you're a Star Wars fan, you get the parody and humour of LEGO Star Wars, and you get to see a different way of showing that world. That works for all of our games."
But where does that humour come from? And how much is Traveller's Tales allowed to mess with these huge brands that it works with?
"It could be considered quite British, I suppose," says Philip of the games' particular brand of humour. "We've got some really interesting personalities in the company. We've got writers and cutscene artists and animators who basically come up with this stuff on their own. As soon as a storyboard comes in, you know who's behind it, because you get to know them pretty well if you work with them. Some of the Lego humour comes directly from the team, and then other bits and pieces come from the films."
Traveller's Tales is generally allowed a remarkable amount of artistic license with Batman, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter and the rest. Ask any developer about licensed development and they'll tell you that it's a minefield of creative restrictions, approval processes and rushed, impossible deadlines – but not for this studio. Even though it's always working with at least two non-videogame brands – LEGO itself, and whichever license they're dealing with – the development process runs smoothly.
"It's easier than it should be," Ring agrees. He explains that the LEGO games' good reputation has a lot to do with why TT is allowed so much freedom: Warner Brothers, Disney et cetera simply trust the studio to do a good job. "Everybody's on board with what we want to do with these games, so we can have open discussions between the partners," says Philip. "We actually get quite a bit of freedom."
"As the designers and the artists and the writers come up with ideas for the cutscenes and things, we get to share that with the companies we work with now, and they get LEGO games because they've played the other ones – they understand what we're trying to do. We get some flexibility with the license, and we have discussions about it all the time. We have a lot of fun pushing the boundaries of what we can and can't do."
Sniffing out the trail of the Darkest Brotherhood in Tamriel...