Great reviews and retail success was one thing. Perks, like receiving e-mails from parents saying it was the first game they ever played with their children, or when they see people laugh at the game for the first time, are something else. "That was always incredibly heartening," he says. "And we were very privileged and lucky to have those experiences." After Giant Interactive's achievements, they retain the rights to LEGO gaming, and they eventually joined with Traveller's Tales to form a single entity, TT Games . They've since gone on to create a highly successful LEGO Star Wars sequel and have moved on to future projects together, including LEGO Batman.
But what's the game's secret? "Seeing people laugh" is something that sticks with Smith, which surprised him at first. "One of the most important things about LEGO Star Wars is that it's funny," he says. "That wasn't something we initially set out to do. ... Because so few games are funny, it's not something we identified ourselves as. Perhaps that's one of the reasons we were able to. I think it'd be quite hard to just set out to 'be funny.'"
A lot of that comes from the playful juxtaposition of Star Wars and LEGO, but that's not to say it works as a parody. "That'll be something quite different and quite knowing and more ironic and reliant on a close knowledge of the source material," Smith says. "We find that our game is so widely played, especially at the younger age group, that there's many younger players who are encountering LEGO for the first time in the game. And even encountering Star Wars for the first time. There's no necessary knowledge of the movies. The characters are engaging in their own right."
The game's humor more comes from - perversely - the faithfulness. By simply trying to render Star Wars in LEGO, it changes things. "Inevitably, it was going to have a fresh take. When we looked at the drama of the movies and put them into LEGO, then brought them to life as energetic game characters ... they tended to act not exactly as they did in the movie. They tended to fall over quite a lot more." Cue physical comedy, double-taking and - always popular - things being smashed up. Which, in terms for recipes for success, seems likely to remain a solid one.
Kieron Gillen has been writing about videogames for far too long now. His rock and roll dream is to form an Electro-band with Miss Kittin and SHODAN pairing up on vocals.
