While Mindscape would continue on under new management after the company sold itself, the Lego Group did not contract the developer again for Lego Island 2, or any further project. "So they fired everybody before it started selling. "They believe that the company did not want to have to pay out those bonuses," Crecente commented. So they fired the whole team, and then they folded the company."Ĭrecente added that this is an account he had heard from numerous people connected with the project that he had spoken to, while researching the Bits N' Bricks podcast series. And so they owed us royalties, they owed us a lot of bonuses and they decided that they would fold the company rather than pay us. And when the game came out, rather than pay off the, uh, the people who work on it, I mean, they sold like a lot of copies in the first day. "We have a terrific program in place for bonuses, for the team.
"When the game came out, we knew that it was going to be big," Lego Island senior producer Scott Anderson said.
#LEGO ISLAND EMULATOR SERIES#
The most recent episode of the series charts the Lego Group's long and slightly stubborn journey to joining the world of video games, and the release of Lego Island, its most memorable early title.ĭocumentary maker Ethan Vincent and games journalist Brian Crecente talk to various people employed within the Lego Group at the time, as well as those who worked on Lego Island itself. It's an eye-opening detail dug into by Lego Bits N' Bricks, a new and officially-sanctioned podcast series from the Lego Group which is being released episodically to celebrate this year's 25th anniversary of Lego joining the world of video games. But when it became clear how successful Lego Island would be, Mindscape bosses took action to avoid paying them their contracted royalties. The small team which built Lego Island had worked on the game for two years and had already begun work on an underwater-set follow-up. Mindscape, developer of the iconic 1997 Lego game Lego Island, laid off the project's team to avoid paying them various bonuses.