This would have been my piece for the second issue of Buttonhook. As the zine has been shelved indefinitely, I’m sharing it here, with some minor expansions, as I don’t have to follow the 300 word limit.
The 1999 PC game LEGO Rock Raiders, developed by Data Design Interactive, served as a tie-in for one of LEGO’s earliest attempts at a complex narrative. A spaceship falls into a wormhole and the only hope for the crew of minifigures to return home is to mine the nearby Planet U for its energy crystals.
Players were teleported into one of 25 levels to build a base and collect resources. Despite being a real-time strategy game, there were no enemy armies or “fog of war.” Dangers were natural: lava, a dwindling air supply, rock slides, and subterranean creatures. For most levels, the win condition was collecting a set number of energy crystals. Searching for lost miners and vehicles made up the remainder.
The true difficulty of the game derived from its target audience. Rated E for everyone and marketed in Scholastic order forms, it didn’t require the ability to read; all mission briefings, tiles, and tooltips were read aloud.
I was one of the many players who struggled to play it as a child. I’d never encountered anything like it before and could sense that there was a mastery to the game that was just outside my comprehension. I built buildings and vehicles based on what was cool and fun to use and not was what was most efficient. There is a fixed number of crystals per level, so I frequently built myself into a corner, unaware that I could delete constructions and get my resources back.
This, along with its lack of “sandbox” mode, meant it was one of the few games I owned that I didn’t complete. I would pick it up often years later, but could never get far, as it is infamously difficult to emulate on newer machines.
And yet there’s a large community of dedicated fans for this 23 year old game, for a LEGO theme that barely lasted a year. One fan has even made Manic Miners, a total re-creation of the game with modern expectations in mind. Players are encouraged to use every building and vehicle to explore larger, more complex levels, allowing you to truly “play” with this theme as if you were imagining it with your toys.
Yet there are still no opposing armies. The only enemy is the planet itself, the crumbling cavern walls and disgruntled monsters whose crystalline food you steal. Perhaps there is something to be said about man’s exploitation of resources, uncaring to the destruction of nature, but none is ever given. You are, after all, simply playing with LEGOs, and the only goal is to have fun with the pieces you’re given. And, boy, are these fun pieces.
