Bricks Of Eight: Talking LEGO And Pirates With Traveller’s Tales

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Bricks Of Eight: Talking LEGO And Pirates With Traveller’s Tales

Traveller’s Tales have been recreating classic movies, brick by brick, since 2005 when LEGO Star Wars gave us a double dose of nostalgia. Since then Indiana Jones, Batman and Harry Potter have all received the LEGO treatment. I caught up with Traveller’s Tales’ Jonathan Smith to talk about the philosophy of the series and their latest title, LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean.

Bricks Of Eight: Talking LEGO And Pirates With Traveller's Tales

LEGO Star Wars was a game concept that raised eyebrows back in 2005. Who conceived the idea?

Well, I suppose you’d have to go back 75 years and credit the creator of LEGO, Ole Kirk Christiansen, and then there was a team of people at LEGO led by Tom Stone who, in the early 2000s, wanted to create a new kind of LEGO video game.

It was Tom who realised that people who play games are looking for excitement and drama, and the best place to find those is in character and stories, such as Star Wars. LEGO had already entered into a licensing agreement with LucasArts to produce figures and playsets back in 1999, so the pathway had been built and we were lucky to be able to induce Travellers Tales, a UK developer with particular expertise in the field of creating games for a younger audience, to create the first demo of LEGO Star Wars, which Lucas Arts loved.

I’d worked at other game companies in the UK but it was tremendously stimulating for me to learn about ‘play’, a very small word but a big idea, from the greatest toy company in the world.

Bricks Of Eight: Talking LEGO And Pirates With Traveller's Tales

What makes a universe or an Intellectual Property (IP) ripe for the LEGO treatment?

We’ve been lucky to work with some of the world’s favourite characters and stories over the years and what we have found in them is a wide variety of colourful characters with cool abilities; dramatic adventures, with a strong story; and lots of different locations.

That gives you the building blocks to add action and gameplay to, but the other characteristic is that they’re universes open to a lightness of touch, where the surprising doesn’t feel alien.

Having worked with a few IP owners now, has it always been plain sailing or do they sometimes veto your ideas?

In all of those companies, there are teams dedicated to ensuring that those who work with their IP take care and, in every case, they have always been very supportive of us. We demand a great deal of understanding because a LEGO game will show their property in a way that hasn’t been seen before.

Once that is accepted, then there is a lot of material created that needs to fit in the world and, of course, there are always occasions where we take a step too far or go off in a slightly different direction, but if those instances never arrive then that means we’re playing it too safe. LEGO games have a sense of humour that involves risks and sometimes requires certain people to take a deep breath before they respond.

Bricks Of Eight: Talking LEGO And Pirates With Traveller's Tales Bricks Of Eight: Talking LEGO And Pirates With Traveller's Tales

How would you define that sense of humour?

The LEGO game humour starts from deep roots in the original stories and characters; we are finding the humour that is already there and putting some spin on it. We don’t introduce alien elements but we caricature. There’s a running theme of people falling over, or getting hit by objects, or getting hit by objects and falling over, so there’s some slapstick in there. In a nutshell, in the LEGO version it’s the same characters but they’re mucking about a bit more.

The previous games have made the most of the nostalgia around their settings. Does working with something more current, like Pirates of the Caribbean, change that?

It’s true that Pirates [of the Carribbean] is more current and perhaps doesn’t evoke the kind of nostalgia that goes back decades, like Batman, but there are very archetypal themes in that world that touch on childhood themes such as adventure and seafaring that are incredibly resonant.

Bricks Of Eight: Talking LEGO And Pirates With Traveller's Tales

The gameplay of LEGO games has been, at the core, fairly consistent since the beginning. What innovations have you brought to LEGO Pirates of the Carribbean?

I’d say this is our best looking game to date and we’ve introduced lots of new ways of getting around that are in keeping with being a pirate, so you’ll be climbing the rigging and swinging, things like that. Then there’s Jack Sparrow’s compass, which you can use to find hidden objects. And then we’ve introduced Super Free Play, where you switch to any character that you have unlocked, at any time.

We touched on nostalgia earlier, but which emotions do you want to bring out in people with LEGO games?

The sense that anything is possible; that as players, you have freedom and that creativity and experimentation will be rewarded.

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