Driving at the Speed of Bricks

[Hapori Tohu]

Another Wednesday means another episode of the fabulous Bits N' Bricks podcast! This week, in Season 2 Episode 26 - Rocket Racer, Veronica Voltage, and the Legend of LEGO Racers, Ethan Vincent and Brian Crecente talk about one of the first console games featuring LEGO characters and pieces. The hosts speak with LEGO Racers Producer Keith Morton and Art Lead Cary Penczek as well as Eric Nofsinger, Chief Creative Officer of High Voltage, the studio that developed the game. They delve into the title's inception, development, and all sorts of behind the scenes details, as well as how they utilized some of the work that SPU Darwin did inside The LEGO Group. As always it's a great listen and I'm looking forward to more next week!

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[Chronicler06]

Another early Lego game that I loved playing as a kid (though it wasn't until I rediscovered my copy of the game only a few years ago that I was finally able to fully complete it). Interesting that they had originally intended to have the way the cars were built to affect their performance (which I remember reading about once in the game's manual), but ultimately decided to have the vast majority of the car's performance be determined solely by the chassis for the sake of allowing full creativity without ruining the fun of racing (I guess they forgot to rewrite the manual late in production to clarify that). Also impressive is that they had actually built big physical models of the tracks during game development, much like what Lego Island did for its setting (speaking of Lego Island, interesting that the racing minigame in that game caused a brief scare for the developers of Lego Racers). I also liked how they decided to structure the power-ups system to reflect the building aspect of Lego. Overall, another great episode that I was definitely interested in listening to.