[For the latest guest post, I’m happy to hand over once again to Alexander Sigsworth, who you can find blogging at alexsigsworth.wordpress.com and who most recently wrote about Need for Speed: Underground 2]
When 20th Century Fox allowed George Lucas to retain the rights to all profits from Star Wars tie-in products, they didn’t expect it to be the film that would revolutionise brand merchandising. In 1977, the film was such an unexpected success that Kenner, licensed to manufacture the action figures of Luke, Leia, Chewbacca and R2-D2 – found they couldn’t meet the unprecedented demand in time for the Christmas season. Instead, they produced “Early Bird Certificate Packages”, which children could use to order the toys when they were ready. So popular was the film that the equivalent of an empty box sold just as well as one with something inside. The guarantee that they’d receive a Star Wars toy eventually was worth as much as really having one.
By the time the 1980s came around, the “Star Wars effect” had well and truly taken shape. American cinema was ready for a decade of high-budget, high-profit genre fiction in which the film industry and the toy industry were more closely related than ever before. Films were now more akin to commercials for the tie-in products that were to follow. Studios were no longer competing just at the box office but for the status of most in-demand toy that Christmas. Star Wars had started a gold rush.
While cross-promotion had already existed for a long time, before George Lucas it was a secondary business, an afterthought. After Star Wars is when everything changed. Children no longer wanted to play with soldiers and vehicles: they wanted to play with soldiers and vehicles from a film released earlier that year. They no longer wanted to imagine alien landscapes and monsters: they wanted to imagine alien landscapes and monsters that had been brought to life on screen that summer. The age of the Generic Toy was over. What children wanted to play with wasn’t so much toys based on films, but the films themselves.
Growing up, everything I wanted to play with was straight out of something I could watch. Every toy shop was full of characters who were “from something”. All the commercials I saw during Saturday morning cartoons were the same. That’s the way culture had become, because everyone had followed the Star Wars model, because the Star Wars model had proven to work. Or at least proven to work if your world was popular enough, you knew what children wanted and you knew how to market it. That’s the effect Star Wars had on the market: it warped everything around it. It has shaped the modern world.
This was bad news for LEGO. While some original toys remained popular, the construction toy company was in trouble. 1992 was the beginning of its decline and 1998 was its worst year on record, when it posted its first annual loss – £23 million – and was forced to lay-off 1,000 employees. Things weren’t looking good.
The following year was 1999… and Star Wars became a trilogy no longer. With the original trilogy, Star Wars had created an entirely new status quo for marketing that no one – not even 20th Century Fox – had seen coming. This time, in the run up to Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Lucasfilm knew how popular it would be. This time, they could be ready.
As part of its $20,000,000 advertising campaign, Lucasfilm licensed deals with Hasbro, Pepsi… and LEGO. It was the first time the company had been commissioned to manufacture Minifigs and sets based on a pre-existing intellectual property.
The move made complete sense. The LEGO Group was founded in 1932 and the market had evolved in the 67 years since. In a post-Star Wars world, the blank canvas was out and telling new tales in a familiar world was where it was at. LEGO couldn’t beat Star Wars. So it joined it. For the first time, a film’s marketing campaign involved LEGO tie-in sets. It was innovative, outside-the-box thinking. A new way of promoting a movie.
When it was released in May 1999, LEGO’s sales went up. Combining LEGO and Star Wars had worked. The licensed tie-in sets were a success.
But the success was short-lived.
After the hype of the film died down, so did interest in the LEGO sets. People wanted to buy the LEGO Star Wars toys when there was a new Star Wars film out, but lost interest once it had come-and-gone. Outside the films, the Star Wars franchise had always thrived. From 1984 to 1998, when the possibility of another Star Wars film had only been a hypothetical pipe dream, Star Wars comics, novels and arcade games had sustained themselves without the presence of their source material – but that couldn’t be said for the LEGO sets. When Episodes I and II (The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones) were playing, the sets sold. The rest of the time, they sat there. The concept of LEGO Star Wars was seen as a gimmick, as not being real Star Wars.
By 2003, The LEGO Group’s situation had declined even further. Sales were down 30% year-on-year, leaving the company $800,000,000 in debt. The Star Wars sets were only ever a temporary boost. Despite the franchise’s absolute diamond status, an internal report explained that nothing of value had been added to the LEGO portfolio in the previous ten years. To put that a simpler way: LEGO had produced branded toys tying-in to a movie trilogy that grossed over $2,000,000,000 worldwide and were still failing as a company.
The Group was shedding market value and was forced to downsize by closing its video game studio, LEGO Software – and this is where things get interesting.
LEGO Software was founded in 1996 as an attempt to help revive the failing brand by branching-out into new media. It had developed LEGO-themed games such as LEGO Island, LEGO Chess and LEGO Stunt Rally. The problem was that, while being LEGO-themed and having the aesthetic of LEGO, the games weren’t LEGO. You couldn’t physically build anything, hold the blocks in your hands and fit them together. The experience of a LEGO video game wasn’t enough to replace the experience of playing with LEGO for real – and the person most aware of this was LEGO Software’s Tom Stone.
He realised that LEGO video games needed more than the LEGO gimmick. He understood that they needed to be legitimate video games in their own right. A game with more then generic stock characters and with a narrative to do something with them.
It was Tom Stone who suggested developing a game based on the LEGO Star Wars sets. It wasn’t the concept of a licensed LEGO game that was confusing – they’d already made LEGO Creator games for properties like Harry Potter but that had been a sandbox simulator, simply a means to play with virtual LEGO bricks and nothing more. What Tom Stone realised was that there was a reason the LEGO Harry Potter sets had been licensed in the first place. Warner Bros had seen the potential for licensed LEGO sets based on LEGO Star Wars. All the intellectual property licenses LEGO had acquired had been granted to them based on the success of their Star Wars sets. Ultimately, it all came back to that.
Stone’s idea was to develop a LEGO Star Wars video game that would invert the usual creative process: it would be a Star Wars game first and a LEGO game second. Rather than simply make it a way of playing with the pre-existing Star Wars sets virtually, his idea was to use the LEGO aesthetic and design for a game that would retell the story in a new way. That’s what was confusing. Why tell a story that had already been told? That people already knew? With no dialogue and condensed for simplicity? Why use the Star Wars license to offer a budget version? Why would anyone have any reason to care?
But with Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith only two years away, there’d only be one more chance to release a big tie-in game. They needed to try something. All the relevant parties approved it. They set to work.
Then LEGO Software was closed as the LEGO Group fought to preserve its diminishing influence. So… Stone, with former LEGO Software executive Jonathan Smith, set up a new developer: Giant Interactive Entertainment. Stone was managing director and Smith was head of production. Lucasfilm transferred them the license and the LEGO Star Wars video game project was able to continue.
It was now 2004. At an annual loss of $174, 000, 000, the LEGO Group was almost bankrupt. Even their licensed sets were only making-up 30% of their sales. Something needed to come along.
That something… was LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game. Announced on the Star Wars website on 20th July 2004, it was previewed at San Diego Comic-Con International later that week in the year the convention expanded into Hall H for the first time.
It was… an interesting move for both brands. An unexpected fusion. To LEGO’s surprise, it generated a positive response. It had been done before but it hadn’t been done before. It was familiar but unfamiliar. Something the fans had already seen but something they’d never seen. The same bricks from the same box, assembled into a new combination.
It was a big risk for LEGO. Star Wars is inherently combat-based. You can’t tell the Star Wars story without depicting the violence explicitly. It may only be fantasy fighting – the blasters only fire lasers and lightsabers don’t really exist – but still… characters kill other characters and that’s something LEGO had previously kept out of their brand in any form. In the end, they decided that anyone who liked LEGO Star Wars already liked Star Wars, so the combat would be expected.
Everything else? No one knew what to expect. This was the first LEGO adaptation game. It was an entirely new subgenre. Could it work? Could you really cross-over those two things? Was the Venn diagram not a bit too specific, too niche?
On the 15th April, Giant Interactive was acquired by Traveller’s Tales and the two companies merged to form TT Games, with Stone as president of the remaining former Giant team. The game was scheduled to be released just seven days later on the 22nd April 2005, almost an entire month before Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. This is quite common, of course; plenty of novelisations are released before the films they adapt and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover was no different either. It was expected that fans would buy the game and then simply not play it until after they’d seen the film – but even then, they all knew how it would end anyway. They knew what state of Galactic affairs would be set up. They knew Anakin Skywalker would become Darth Vader and battle Obi-Wan Kenobi. They knew Luke and Leia would be born and Padme would almost certainly die. They knew the ending already because it’s a prequel. What they didn’t know was the details. Any other aspects of the plot had leaked anyway.
As it is, the story is so condensed that it didn’t matter. If you’re not familiar with the prequel films, the narrative presented by the game will make little sense. I know, because I actually wasn’t when I first played it. That might sound like an odd choice but I’d already played LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy – though that I’d also played that before seeing any of the Original Trilogy films either. The difference is the story of the original trilogy made perfect sense for the Star Wars virgin I was then, compared with that of the prequel trilogy, which didn’t. A big reason of this is that, between games, the way they communicate the story changed. LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game has less humour and melodramatic body language. It’s like watching Star Wars on mute rather than a version of it that’s designed to have no sound in the first place.
There are other differences, too. The camera leaves more to be desired, for example; they hadn’t quite figured-out how to have so many elements on screen at the same time without making the game incoherent. The level design isn’t as refined as it would come to be; I frequently found myself overwhelmed with too much information all at once and the progression mechanics are a bit repetitive. To say it’s a LEGO game, I don’t understand why it took them until the second time around to realise that characters should be able to build things. And as for the Free Play mode? Well… I’d question the illogical choices made there.
There are a lot of design flaws that were improved by its sequel, which is the one I’d rather play. But that’s not the point. The point is, LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game didn’t just lay down the track for an improved successor but for every LEGO video game since. It established the formula within which there’s room for variation based on the property, from structure to style. That’s why the Star Wars fans liked it so much: it spoke the unique language of Star Wars. It included the usual tagline at the beginning, used the opening crawl to set the scene for each chapter and borrowed iconic elements from the films for all the small details, like music stings for chapter-end screens. Too much of the game is LEGO for it to not count as a LEGO game. But too much of the game is Star Wars for it to not count as a Star Wars game.
That’s how the game helped save LEGO. It justified licensing the Star Wars brand and appealed to fans of both by understanding what each of them likes. Plus, it made a promise that there could be more LEGO adaptation games further on – which there were. There have been LEGO games based on Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, DC, Middle Earth, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Incredibles, Marvel, Jurassic World, Rock Band – even The LEGO Movie, which is something LEGO could only have had the confidence to do with the success of this initial game. Each of them appeal to fans of the source material and to LEGO fans who’ve collected them all.
By 2008, LEGO was back on its way up. Themed video games had boosted sales by 32%. By 2009, licensed toys made up 60% of sales. Even I can remember visiting Hamley’s one year and seeing an entire floor dedicated to LEGO – and there was LEGO Star Wars, with its scale LEGO Darth Vader. Of course I wanted some LEGO that day and brought a blue LEGO Brick-shaped crate of it home with me. LEGO was back – because they’d realised the real reason they’re so beloved.
Building a LEGO Death Star or a LEGO Hogwarts isn’t the end of the process, it’s just the beginning. Once you’ve finished it, you can finally begin imagining it coming to life – and this is the game that demonstrated exactly what that would look like. It fulfilled the wish that LEGO had always enabled: seeing your creations fly free. Be it a pirate ship, a dinosaur island, a city full of superheroes… or a galaxy far, far away…
Top of the charts for week ending 30 April 2005:
UK games:
Lego Star Wars: The Video Game (Traveller’s Tales/Giant Entertainment, PS2)
Japan games: Nintendogs (Nintendo, DS) 
UK films: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 
UK singles: Tony Christie ft. Peter Kay – (Is This the Way to) Amarillo 
UK albums: Bruce Springsteen – Devils & Dust