Lego Racers Can't Be Made Today

Just wanted to say thanks for such a thoughtful in depth analysis focused on the design elements of Lego Racers. It was the 7th released game I worked on, but the first one I was given pretty much complete freedom to design whatever and however I wanted. It feels good to hear positive nostalgic memories highlighting and reaffirming those creative choices, even a quarter century later. The video was a pleasure to watch and made me smile, Thank you. 👍

The worst thing lego did was stop making their original themes.

honestly they should bring back some of these old themes, like rock raiders, aquanauts, western, medieval, adventure, etc, i think kids would still love them, and especially returning fans would

We actually DID get a single player focused kart racer with unique mechanics with Team Sonic Racing, but Sega refused to market it well.

I've never realized how unique Lego Racers was when I was a kid. As of today, I have yet to see a kart racing game that can top the warp boost. Also, literally no other racing game has shortcuts as unique as the ones on Magma Moon Marathon.

I think what you're saying is that we just need a "LEGO Racers Remastered." 😊

Lego Racers was THE game of my childhood. I had all the tracks memorised down to every brick location and all the shortcuts, and when I was not playing it, I was going around humming the themes and annoying my mum by pretending I am Jonny Thunder. My best friend had it too and we often played together and when we were at school, we would troll each other by drawing the mummy curse into each other's notebooks sneakily which meant the one who got cursed had to act confused for a while 😀 So many fond memories!

Paying coins in Mario Kart for shortcuts could be awesome. I always used to hate getting the coin item since they introduced it since it feels so dead in the hand, but it if you could use them for more than a small passive boost then getting the item might become really exciting.

I would say that yes, this type of game is against what most AAA companies do. But remember, we have a bustling indie industry in gaming right now

Great video - One underrated note is that Racers was robust and just ...worked. We had most of the 90s/2000s Lego PC games, and they were usually pretty unstable or wouldn't work at all. Racers ran perfectly on every PC I installed it on, and would run without the disc after installation. I'd put it on my friends' machines and we'd play it together - funnily enough on single player taking turns, or one friend driving and the other doing power-ups.

7:08 Wait, WHAT?! I’ve been playing this game since at least either 1999 or 2000 and I never knew the shortcut through the base shield had the code right there on the wall the whole time. I thought the coloured spotlight code for the shield was pure trial & error.

I liked how in the second half, you re-analyzed lego racers with a more critical lens. Most videos like this would just end it at gushing over nostalgia.

Well, the silver lining is that 20-ish years later, our beloved Rocket Racer got real in one form or another

I did a lot of boss bashing in this game. Where the goal wasn't to get first place, but to make the boss get last place. It was a fun way to spice up parts of the game that weren't a challenge anymore.

Fun fact about the shortcut in 20:14: You don't really need the shield to pass through that wall. The game checks if a human player has the shield active and if so, it blinks and lets anyone pass through it. A CPU can't do it of course, but a rival human player can. I learned this the hard way when racing my friend who used MY active shield to get through there. One thing that annoys me a bit about the game is that the car building lacks green bricks (and other colors too, but especially green).

Crazy how many people grew up with this game! I grew up with Lego Racers 2 and never really enjoyed Lego Racers 1 but I never realized just how different the 2 were

Great video! I made a lot of the sfx for this game, and that's actually me laughing as Johnny Racer. Oh the memories!

It is sad that the single player aspect of racing games have disappeared over time. Back in the day there was Diddy Kong Racing and Crash Team Racing with their adventure modes, and Mario Kart DS' mission mode (kinda). LEGO Racers doesn't really have an adventure mode, though in my opinion, playing through the circuits feels like more of an adventure than cups in Mario Kart. But when you win the circuit, you unlock the circuit champion's car set, and get more customization options for your car. You also have this in the older Mario Kart games, but to me this felt more special, there was a connection between what you got and what you did. Why do you unlock Funky Kong in Mario Kart Wii by doing some time trials? Nobody knows, but in LEGO Racers, you unlock Captain Redbeard and his pirate/imperial buddies when you win his circuit. As a kid I would replay LEGO Racers over and over again, with new cars and/or challenges, but I haven't touched the cups in Mario Kart DS or Wii in forever. Also, the car customization in this game is amazing, I've never seen something like it. 20:40 The tracks Athens Dash and Daisy Circuit also have the piranha plant plyboards. But the one in Athens is never worth it, and the one in Daisy Circuit is always worth it, so not much decision making there.

Hearing someone talk about Lego Racers in 2024 gave some whiplash. Used to play the hell out of it with my cousin on the N64. I always thought the different parts had different hidden stat values, and would pick the fantasy theme cause it was the "fastest."

The only recent game that was attempted like this was LEGO Legacy: Heroes Unboxed. It was a single-player focused, free-to-play mobile game similar to Raid: Shadow Legends. It had mostly classic characters like Basil, and you could unlock their sets for bonuses and trivia. But the game did poorly, they added Ghostbusters to try to get licensed IP in there, and now it shut down.