Will Lego be the Next Blockbuster?

Billund, Denmark. It was autumn 2010 when the head of innovation at Lego stepped into Jørgen Vig Knudstorp’s office, CEO at Lego Group. He discovered an emerging Swedish studio, Mojang, that was basically making a virtual construction platform (note the term platform vs. game). The first platform of the kind was released more than 15 years ago (with the Doom WADs), so this was nothing new. Even Lego had produced their own “sandbox” in 1998, the Lego Creator. But this new game had something else, a community of contributors, almost unlimited user generated content, some secret rules for object crafting that were not directly exposed by the studio in any tutorial, and the ability of playing online within the same world between users. Oh, yes, and some skeletons, monsters, spiders and zombies wandering around. Read the rest of this entry »