Feature: 'TT Games: Immersed in Toys'

In today's exclusive Gamasutra feature, regular contributor Jim Rossignol speaks to Lego Star Wars lead designer Jonathan Smith and Managing Director Tom Stone about the formation of developer TT Games, pitching the bizarre franchise, and why the game is love at first sight for many. In the following extract, Smith and Stone describe the initial conception of Lego Star Wars: “Play has many meanings, and its own semantics. Lego was about nothing less than fun,” says Smith. “And that’s not mere corporate gobbledegook. To be immersed in that and tasked with finding out what games Lego could make was liberating. We meshed that with our own commercial awareness, so it wasn’t just R&D. It was about making something that kids would love to play with.” But, more importantly, Giant Entertainment was really set on making something that everyone could enjoy. All this came about rather fortuitously for the fledgling team. At the time that Stone and Smith wanted to expand their horizons with the Lego Star Wars project, Lego itself was looking to focus on its plastic toys, and shed its more nebulous businesses, as Stone explained: “Lego wanted to address the core business, so the theme parks are now owned by Merlin (who run the London Dungeons and other large tourist attractions), because Lego needed to give the parks to the right people. The same was true with videogames.” Giant took that task on, and got stuck into creating a prototype of Lego Star Wars. “And we knew we had what it took to express Lego interactively,” says Smith. You can read the full Gamasutra feature for more (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).