Lego to Develop In-House Video Game Production Team
By Movieguide® Contributor
After 20 years of successful third-party Lego-branded video games, Lego is finally stepping into the industry itself, raising its software development team to over 1,800 members.
Nearly every Lego-branded video game has been developed by a team not directly under Lego’s control. Nonetheless, Lego video games have been popular for decades through timeless classics like “Lego Star Wars,” “Lego Marvel,” “Lego Harry Potter,” and “Lego Indiana Jones.” More recently, the brand has found massive success through “Lego Fortnite,” which has amassed over 89 million players since it launched in December of 2023, per Engadget.
With a clear, established audience, Lego now plans to take over the video game production of its brand through an in-house game dev team. While the company already had a few hundred software developers on staff, it has recently more than tripled its employees in that field, bringing the number to over 1,800.
“We have made quite a few investments in the future – I’d almost rather overinvest,” CEO Niels Christiansen told the Financial Times. “That’s the benefit of being family-owned and long term.”
Under the new development team, Lego remains committed to its child-friendly brand along with the quality of games that players have come to expect from Lego titles.
“We can definitely say as long as we’re under the Ledo brand we can cover experiences for kids of all ages, digital or physical,” Christiansen added.
This investment into a dedicated video game development team comes as Lego looks to expand its presence in the entertainment world. Last November, Lego announced it is developing three live-action movies through a partnership with Universal. Though they have shared little else about these projects, their interest in movies was further shown through the release of a Lego animation-based documentary about the musician Pharrell Williams.
Related: Lego Announces 3 Live-Action Movies in Production
“Pharrell specifically said that Lego bricks are a great universal tool in which anyone can understand a story because you have many figures which represent people, and of course brick by brick and the system itself, which can be built into anything,” she added. “Using it as a medium to tell his story for him felt like a no-brainer, but it’s something that can resonate with all ages.”
The documentary went on to be nominated for multiple awards including Best Documentary Feature and Best Music Documentary by the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards.
It is clear the Lego hopes to leverage its status as a household name to branch beyond its core product. Whether it will be successful in doing so remains to be seen, but all signs point towards success.
Movieguide® previously reported on Lego:
Nintendo recently made a fun announcement, sharing a teaser trailer for a partnership with Lego to create a Lego Gameboy playset that will be released this fall.
In the 15-second teaser clip, iconic pieces of the Gameboy, like the purple buttons and D-pad are shown reimagined as Lego pieces falling into place. Though there is no specific release date, the teaser does share that it will come out in October.
The creation of this replica console continues a long partnership between Nintendo and Lego. The two companies have released dozens of sets together that reimagine many of Nintendo’s most beloved franchises. Mario, Bowser, Link, Zelda and Yoshi are just some of the characters Lego has featured in its playsets in the past.
One of the most popular crossovers between the two franchises, however, is a $300 remake of the original Nintendo Entertainment System. That kit includes over 2,600 pieces to create an NES, a TV, two controllers and a cartridge for the original Super Mario Bros. game. This playset provides an idea of what the upcoming Gameboy remake could include.
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