| LEGO Racers CC | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| LEGO Theme: | |
| Developer(s): |
Bizarre Creations |
| Date Released: |
Canceled, was planned for Christmas 2004 |
| Genre: |
Racing |
| Platforms: |
PlayStation 2, Xbox |
LEGO Racers CC, also known as LEGO Racers: Create + Control, was a canceled Drome Racers video game set for release in 2004 for PlayStation 2 and Xbox.
The game was advertised in some June - December 2004 LEGO catalogs (UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, and possibly others). Besides that, the only known information on it comes from its developers.
Lego initially came to Bizarre Creations with a very ambitious pitch . The game was to be a fairly standard racing game, but with a vehicle builder included in it. You’d be able to build a car and race it in game, but then also be able to order your design as a real toy and have it sent to you in the mail with instructions, box art and everything a shop-bought Lego kit would have. That would be much more doable now, but 15 years ago it was just too ambitious and that idea got shelved fairly quickly.
By that time the game was already in development. It still had the vehicle builder in it but, tbh , without the toy idea to support it, the game never really found its own identity.
Lego had their Racers CC Drome brand going at the time and the game was initially mean to be part of that, so the vehicles had action features like buzz-saws and rams on their noses and more of an action racer feel.
This didn’t last all that long tho, and we were then asked to make things more realistic. I think they wanted to try and take some market share from games like Need for Speed and Gran Turismo so the cars all became very shiny and sleek and the game more about tuning and handling. I remember actively being told to make the vehicles look less Lego-like, which seems very odd to me at the time!
Eventually things swung back the other way and the game became less of a racing game and more of a karting game, with weapons and power ups, but by that point we were pretty much out of time.
It was very nearly finished. Maybe only a month away from being mastered.
The game had a standard championship game structure, with cups for winning etc.
Between races, you could customise your vehicle’s length, width, wheel size & suspension in the builder, all of which affected handling. You could also make cosmetic changes and attach weapons. The game would generate AI vehicles before each race that were fairly similar to the vehicle you had built.
Tracks were fairly standard karting tracks; with shortcuts, hidden routes, that sort of thing.
It was initially supposed to feature the characters and story from the Racers CC Drome brand. We were encouraged to design our own characters as well, and make them more realistic than in the little comics and the 4dmovie they had already used them for. I don’t think this got past the ideas phase tho. We never actually built any characters.
The tracks were pretty generic themes. There was a jungle temple one, a city one, a snow one and an airport one that I can remember. I think they were originally connected to the Drome themes but Lego didn’t give us any more of a steer than that and gave us creative freedom. a LEGO Racers CC developer
1. What can you remember about the gameplay?
Well, the most important thing was that you built your own car out of LEGO pieces. The chassis/engine would be built out of more common shapes, while the exterior was more angular/curved. We didn't 'cover' the car though - it looked like a LEGO car, not a facsimile of a real car.
I believed towards the end we were playing with an elemental concept - fire, lightning, earth, etc... Each track had features on it that you could take advantage of if you'd built your car correctly.
We had some problems with min-maxing. Players could build outrageous cars that did 3 things VERY WELL, and that was often enough to win the race. Balance was hard due to the customization effort.
Also: I remember it being a PS2 game primarily.
2. How complete do you remember it being?
We had a somehow polished prototype if I remember correctly. We had a working track (in a volcano I think) and you could build your car, though it was pretty rough and ready. I don't think we used the handling model from PGR because we wanted this game to be less realistic and more 'arcade' than we had in the PGR games.
3. What do you remember about the development history?
Not a huge amount to be honest. I was on PGR at the time so I wasn't heavily involved, though I seem to recall us having about 10-15 full time developers on the pitch prototype.
4. Did it have a story? (Any characters/NPCs/etc)
No, at that stage in development it was primarily a racer. No real story or characters - though they might have had that planned. a LEGO Racers CC developer
the game was at a first playable state, you could build your own car and drive around a lego terrain world.
it got canned because of a huge hole in LEGO finances
Additionally, a MobyGames page for its project manager refers to the project as "LEGO Racers: Create + Control", and also mentions the canceled game LEGO Soccer Adventure, but gives no further information.
The vehicles seen in the ad's screenshots have a style similar to that seen in the Drome Racers comics and LEGO Racers 4D, with inspiration taken from real LEGO but an overall more realistic aesthetic. Some of the vehicles seem to take elements from the pullback motor Drome Racers sets of 2004, such as 8384 Jungle Crasher, though none of the vehicles in the ad match real sets exactly. For example, some car parts in the car builder screenshots resemble real LEGO pieces, like the engine piece 41862, rollcage piece 47758, and curved slope piece 30602 on the side, all of which were used in 2004 Drome Racers sets in such fashions.
It should be noted that this game is separate from Drome Racers 2 (also known internally as LEGO Racers 4), a game by ATD that was canceled in 2003. Yet another unrelated LEGO racing game, LEGO Racers: The Video Game, was advertised in 2008/2009, but canceled.
Gallery
References
- Discussion on LEGO Racers 4 and LEGO Racers CC
- The Saga of LEGO Racers CC: From the Developers at Bizarre Creations
