I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration.
Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.
> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of LEGO’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.
I work as a developer @ LEGO in Denmark, but I'm speaking purely for myself here.
My only knowledge is of internal software, and I assume you're speaking about consumer facing software. LEGO did do video game publishing where e.g. the LEGO Island sequels were released through. And the team at LEGO Interactive, the video game publishing arm of the company, later merged with Traveller's Tales to form TT Games that created the LEGO Star Wars games. While they weren't developed by LEGO there was a close relationship.
On the more technical software side I'm personally very fond of LEGO Mindstorm and its ability to make programming more intuitive and tangible while still facilitating "playing with LEGO".
Lego 'lost the plot' for quite a number of years and their only drive was to sell more (poorly designed) sets to survive financially, rather than to see what drove people to buy those sets in the first place: the fact that their kids wanted them. Branching out into the upmarket sets for adults and older kids (large Starwars sets, modular houses and architectural sets such as the London Bridge) was pretty clever as well: you have to sell far fewer sets to people with much deeper pockets to make money that way.
The idea of 'free bricks' such as were available in software was a thing that horrified Lego management, and that's why they couldn't have invented Minecraft. If they had it would have been buried deep. The obvious next step was to allow anything created in such an environment to be immediately orderable, Lego experimented with that for a bit, shipping 'MOC's, but ended up having to withdraw it due to overwhelming success. Obviously that is something you should then fix but instead the idea was - as far as I know - abandoned.
> The idea of 'free bricks' such as were available in software was a thing that horrified Lego managemen
It seems that 'free bricks' in general horrifies them. I went to visit one of the biggest sellers of Lego in Norway and they had been told that Lego no longer wants stores to sell plain lego bricks, but only Lego sets. Which for me seems rather strange.
My step-mum ran a small toyshop a few years ago. She could only order limited numbers of plain lego bricks and the amount was dictated by the number of expensive fancy sets she bought.
It's not strange. Sets have high margins and their logistics can be optimized to hell and back. Loose pieces are low-margin and awkward to deal with. It's the same reason you cannot buy Coca-Cola, or milk, on tap from a supermarket.
Given that the Lego patent has expired and there's plenty of "off-brand" sets out there now, the market is free to fill this gap; it just needs a quality producer, because most of the knockoff stuff is just crap in comparison. A big one could be Minecraft, if they were to produce bricks and brick sets. They'd have to stop charging the merchandise premium though.
Oh I love mindstorms. We used it years ago as part of my CS program at university. Our assignment was to figure out how to route trains around a network in haskell (given a track layout and some goals). Some students and I worked to connect the haskell API to real trains through lego RCX bricks. It was super fun, and it (for the first time) gave me the sense that I can make anything.
But mindstorms, PoweredUp, Boost and the whole lego ecosystem at the moment is a mess. The point of lego bricks is that they're inherently compatible - any brick can connect to any other brick, going back for decades. But strangely, lego's software doesn't follow this at all. Despite all running through bluetooth, Mindstorms and PoweredUp work through entirely different (and as far as I can tell, incompatible) software and protocols. Mindstorms programs (which can run on either a mindstorms brick or a PC) should be able to, through bluetooth, connect to and drive any number of mindstorms/poweredup/boost controllers and use them to connect to additional sensors and motors. Then you could use the mindstorms software to program poweredup robots, use mindstorms bricks as the brain for large robots with poweredup hubs, use train controllers as inputs into mindstorms programs, and so on. But you can't. Its all strangely siloed by "theme". Despite using the same plug, you can't even use all of the poweredup / train / mindstorms sensors and motors interchangeably with all of lego's microcontrollers.
On the software side lego maintains two separate & mutually incompatible scratch style programming languages, driven through different apps, to talk to physical hardware that is fundamentally, technically deeply compatible. From any other company I would understand. But this is LEGO. The whole point of lego is that it all connects together. If you have a voice at lego, please help the software teams understand and uphold the same mandate for fundamental interconnectedness in code.
You guys should have invented Minecraft. Even LEGO Digital Designer was crap and got outcompeted by Bricklink Studio, which was a company like 1/1000 the size.
They had plugins for awhile that exported to 3d programs (blender, pov, etc) for awhile if I remember correctly. There are also links to semi reasonable CAD style programs. There is another editor someone recently came out with (the name escapes me at the moment) that looks very promising.
I would combine the ldraw programs with sites like brickset and others to get the exact pieces in the sets I knew I owned. That way I could build things in 3d then build them for real. I think one of the programs I used had a instruction builder too that you could print out.
There was a statement by LEGO's CEO a few years ago making the same point - that they wished they invented minecraft, and talking about how they totally missed the ball on that.
I like my job very much, but the day-to-day is the same as in any other big corporation with all the "agile coaches" and office politics that come with it. What we also get is an amazing workplace (look up LEGO Campus) with a huge amount of tool freedom and flexibility. I've done projects in Rust for internal tooling because that's what I'm excited about right now, and one of my more TDD and CI/CD-interested colleagues is allowed to spend time really fleshing that part of his work out.
And of course, when I first got the job I (as a Dane with Danish family) wasn't told "congratulations with the job". I was, however, told "congratulations with the job at LEGO" with a very big emphasis on the last at LEGO. It's a point of pride when extended family asks because it's so revered.
I don’t think someone with lego in mind could have come up with minecraft.
The problem is that there really isn’t an interface for building with Lego freeform that doesn’t suck for new users. Not many people are willing to get good at something like that for purely creative reasons.
Minecraft works because it’s limited to 1x1x1 bricks. The interface you can make with such a restriction is significantly better.
But I don’t think anyone thinking about lego would have seen that as an acceptable trade off before minecraft.
Minecraft of course was heavily influenced by Slaves to Armok God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. I could totally see making a Lego version of that.
There are like a hundred Warhammer 40k games now. I haven't played tabletop myself, but Sanctus Reach looks like a pretty direct copy of the rules to PC, similar to the Battletech and Blood Bowl games.
The Total War situation is a bit of an odd one, it emulated Warhammer Fantasy Battles, which was discontinued in 2015, Total War: Warhammer came out in 2016. Whether this is a coincidence or GW intentionally not letting well-established Devs work on their active IPs is debatable however.
While the graphics are/were crude, the sheer number of polys and the dynamics of the world and layers of drawing wasn't possible in the early 2000s. Not in first person at any rate.
Look up Ken Silverman's Voxlap engine from the early 2000s. It was most famously used for the game Ace of Spades 0.75 from 2011. It had very basic graphics and I remember even at the time it was advertised as being able to run on anything. I can imagine a game resembling Minecraft being feasible on high end machines in the early 2000s
> The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”.
The core fantasy of Google is supposed to be "collect the world's information to put it at your fingertips", when in reality it's more like "...to sell it to big advertisers".
Same deal with Lego. I doubt they could transition to freeform creativity when their entire business process is oriented towards a diametrically opposite goal.
(This is speaking as a person with three kids and a whole storage rack dedicated to Lego.)
> I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.
The Lego video game series by Traveller’s Tales may be weirdly un-Lego-like, but they are also quite good. So I wouldn’t discount their taste too much.
There was Lego creator, though building part was 3rd person so probably closer to KidCAD than Minecraft.
I actually really wanted to like that game as a kid, but either my computer wasn't beefy enough to run it, or it was a buggy crashy mess (not totally sure which).
It was a buggy crashy mess. Also there wasn't much to do because there was no adversity. Sure there is also no adversity in creative mode MC but don't underestimate how important the first experience you get of having to mine your resources is in slowly introducing the game loop. Creator you just make a few cars, drive them to nowhere, spawn an army of NPCs, watch them fight, that's about it. The Knight's Kingdom version might have been better in that regard.
I got Lego Island 2 for my kid in 2008 which was old at the time. He loved it! It had a nice story line and easy things to do for a 4 year old. When he finished it I found the original Lego Island game second hand and thinking how sequels mostly suck had high expectations. It was a disappointment. Island 2 had :just enough: free roam and 1 not as much, I guess.
There are few Lego games that actually embrace free building or engineering. I've heard it is because Lego doesn't want a digital app to cannibalize their physical sales, which always seemed silly to me.
Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.