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A project needs more than just an artistic vision. She needed a boss to play. Fun foreman.
Lego Group Design Director Michael Fuller has been with the company for 18 years. “the The Lego Batman Movie“That was five or six years of my life,” Fuller says. After finishing the 2017 film, Fuller was trying to figure out what to do next when Donaldson approached him.
“I actually tried to convince him that I wasn’t cut out for it. I’m not a tech guy at all. I’m old school. But Tom said, ‘No, this is what we need.’ I have a lot of smart engineers and technical people. “I need a game man.”
That’s how Fuller was recruited. “In the early days, I was just drawing concepts. I had a wall at Cambridge Consulting with hand-drawn concepts like “What if? What if? What if?”
From there, they moved on to hand-crafted prototypes, a phase that Fuller estimates included half of the total development time. “It was a very small team of people, and you had to be flexible,” he says. This flexibility was tested when early release Smart Brick Jungle Explorers playsets were canceled in favor of the final Star Wars models.
“These were actually out in the world,” says Fuller, holding up one of the boxes marked TEST written in large red letters. “The kids played with them. We got feedback. I spent evenings telemetry, trying to figure out what parts the kids were really enjoying and what parts they weren’t interested in.”
In all my years of gear reporting, I’ve seen very few products that have managed to survive the development process without any compromises. Something is always sacrificed along the way for ease, money, or both. Apparently that is not the case with Smart Brick.
“We said, ‘Let’s do it all. Let’s keep it all in mind,'” Knights says. Lists all the wishlist features that were delivered at the end. There is a compound in the system. The sounds you hear are created, not pre-recorded. There are sensors that can detect light, dark, and color. There are lights on the bricks that can not only change color, but can also communicate with other bricks like a TV remote. Some of this didn’t even exist at the beginning of the project.
Towards the end of my tour of Smart Brick, it struck me that there was clearly technology being developed here that could have applications beyond Lego. And perhaps even military uses, which does not mean that the company would go wrong in such a sector. However, there is still an opportunity to make a lot more money than just selling building block sets.
Donaldson is not interested. He claims that profit has never been the driving factor. “I didn’t say: This is a business case that includes specific revenues.” “We just said: If we can do this, we all know it will be something big.”