How 2K Games spent five years developing LEGO 2K Drive – and why LEGO Racers ‘wasn’t a factor’

LEGO 2K Drive’s Art Director reveals how 2K Games spent five years building the AAA open-world racing game from the ground up – and why the 1999 classic LEGO Racers ‘wasn’t a factor’ during development.

The latest LEGO video game – and one of the first since the LEGO Group reportedly ended its exclusivity agreement with TT Games – gives players the chance to build vehicles from the ground up, then take them out into a vast open world comprised of multiple different biomes. It’s due to launch on consoles and PC in May, which for developers Visual Concepts will represent the chequered flag on a process that began five years ago.

“The partnership started with a lot of our key members who worked on this game,” Visual Concepts Art Director Emmanuel Valdez tells Brick Fanatics. “They worked with 2K to develop some proposals of games that we could do as a partnership. They presented them to the LEGO Group, and they were like, ‘These are all awesome’. But then they asked 2K: ‘What do you guys want to do?’ And our guys said, ‘Well, we have a lot of racing experience. Can we do a racing game?’

“That was really cool, because they gave them the choice for one thing. And it really played to their strengths, which became, ultimately, our team’s strengths. And then we brought in people with open-world experience. That was basically the origins of the game: they knew they wanted the open-world stuff, they knew they could do racing, it’s just how did those elements work together? And that was an evolution over time.”

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Valdez joined the team roughly six months in production, by which time Visual Concepts had already begun working on ‘nailing down the driving mechanics’. Core to that concept is the ability to transform in a flash between three different vehicles, depending on which of the game’s three terrains you’re currently driving across: street, off-road or on water. Your vehicle switches the moment you cross from one terrain to another, and that premise essentially drove the idea of the open world.

“Really the main feature at the time was being able to transform between the three terrain types, so you want a big open space to see what kind of fun can we do with it,” Valdez explains. “Our early prototype had streets, the off-road and waterways for the boat. And as a level designer, how do you make that fun? How do you get players to go to the different terrain types? What are the advantages and disadvantages? How can it be incorporated in races?

“We’re still learning and figuring that out, because we’re always finding new fun ways of doing things. Our level designers work really closely with the world artists to craft this open-world space, and you’re always constantly exploring how players can have fun. And that’s what it comes down to at the end of day. What is fun to do with an off-road vehicle, with a boat, or with the road and asphalt? What kind of things can you do in combination to create this unique experience?”

LEGO 2K Drive is being billed as a triple-A game, which generally refers to titles with higher development and marketing budgets. That’s presumably to set it apart from mobile LEGO games and place it on the same level as TT Games’ efforts, including LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga – but according to Valdez, it’s more than just marketing speak.

“We always had the original vision of making a brand new LEGO AAA experience that we’ve never seen before,” he says. “You look at all the past few [LEGO] games that focus on racing – there aren’t many – but they weren’t the foundations. We had a lot of inspirations; we all play games. But we wanted to make an authentic LEGO experience, a great driving model – something that felt really good.”

Image: NintendoMovies

We couldn’t let mention of previous LEGO racing titles come up without discussing LEGO Racers, the iconic 1999 game that defined video gaming for a particular generation of LEGO fans. But Valdez says that while the team was filled with exactly those gamers, the DNA of LEGO Racers didn’t serve ‘as a basis’ for LEGO 2K Drive. 

“It was more nostalgic,” Valdez says. “We had a lot of people that played some of those games, [and they were] going through YouTube walkthroughs and stuff like that. But it wasn’t a factor at all as a basis or foundation or anything. It was just all from scratch: what feels good? And we nailed that down really early. The game is more arcadey racing, which is more appropriate for LEGO. But because we got that down so early, it let us focus on everything else around it.”

You can find out more about how LEGO 2K Drive actually plays in our hands-on preview of the game, which is available to pre-order now. Click here for a complete breakdown of all three different editions, two of which include early access three days ahead of its May 19 release date.

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Author Profile

Chris Wharfe
I like to think of myself as a journalist first, LEGO fan second, but we all know that’s not really the case. Journalism does run through my veins, though, like some kind of weird literary blood – the sort that will no doubt one day lead to a stress-induced heart malfunction. It’s like smoking, only worse. Thankfully, I get to write about LEGO until then.

Chris Wharfe

I like to think of myself as a journalist first, LEGO fan second, but we all know that’s not really the case. Journalism does run through my veins, though, like some kind of weird literary blood – the sort that will no doubt one day lead to a stress-induced heart malfunction. It’s like smoking, only worse. Thankfully, I get to write about LEGO until then.

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