Just wanted to say thanks for such a thoughtful in depth analysis focused on the design elements of Lego Racers. It was the 7th released game I worked on, but the first one I was given pretty much complete freedom to design whatever and however I wanted. It feels good to hear positive nostalgic memories highlighting and reaffirming those creative choices, even a quarter century later. The video was a pleasure to watch and made me smile, Thank you. 👍

The worst thing lego did was stop making their original themes.

honestly they should bring back some of these old themes, like rock raiders, aquanauts, western, medieval, adventure, etc, i think kids would still love them, and especially returning fans would

I've never realized how unique Lego Racers was when I was a kid. As of today, I have yet to see a kart racing game that can top the warp boost. Also, literally no other racing game has shortcuts as unique as the ones on Magma Moon Marathon.

Paying coins in Mario Kart for shortcuts could be awesome. I always used to hate getting the coin item since they introduced it since it feels so dead in the hand, but it if you could use them for more than a small passive boost then getting the item might become really exciting.

I would say that yes, this type of game is against what most AAA companies do. But remember, we have a bustling indie industry in gaming right now

We actually DID get a single player focused kart racer with unique mechanics with Team Sonic Racing, but Sega refused to market it well.

I think what you're saying is that we just need a "LEGO Racers Remastered." 😊

I liked how in the second half, you re-analyzed lego racers with a more critical lens. Most videos like this would just end it at gushing over nostalgia.

7:08 Wait, WHAT?! I’ve been playing this game since at least either 1999 or 2000 and I never knew the shortcut through the base shield had the code right there on the wall the whole time. I thought the coloured spotlight code for the shield was pure trial & error.

Lego Racers was THE game of my childhood. I had all the tracks memorised down to every brick location and all the shortcuts, and when I was not playing it, I was going around humming the themes and annoying my mum by pretending I am Jonny Thunder. My best friend had it too and we often played together and when we were at school, we would troll each other by drawing the mummy curse into each other's notebooks sneakily which meant the one who got cursed had to act confused for a while 😀 So many fond memories!

Well, the silver lining is that 20-ish years later, our beloved Rocket Racer got real in one form or another

Great video - One underrated note is that Racers was robust and just ...worked. We had most of the 90s/2000s Lego PC games, and they were usually pretty unstable or wouldn't work at all. Racers ran perfectly on every PC I installed it on, and would run without the disc after installation. I'd put it on my friends' machines and we'd play it together - funnily enough on single player taking turns, or one friend driving and the other doing power-ups.

I did a lot of boss bashing in this game. Where the goal wasn't to get first place, but to make the boss get last place. It was a fun way to spice up parts of the game that weren't a challenge anymore.

Great video! I made a lot of the sfx for this game, and that's actually me laughing as Johnny Racer. Oh the memories!

It is sad that the single player aspect of racing games have disappeared over time. Back in the day there was Diddy Kong Racing and Crash Team Racing with their adventure modes, and Mario Kart DS' mission mode (kinda). LEGO Racers doesn't really have an adventure mode, though in my opinion, playing through the circuits feels like more of an adventure than cups in Mario Kart. But when you win the circuit, you unlock the circuit champion's car set, and get more customization options for your car. You also have this in the older Mario Kart games, but to me this felt more special, there was a connection between what you got and what you did. Why do you unlock Funky Kong in Mario Kart Wii by doing some time trials? Nobody knows, but in LEGO Racers, you unlock Captain Redbeard and his pirate/imperial buddies when you win his circuit. As a kid I would replay LEGO Racers over and over again, with new cars and/or challenges, but I haven't touched the cups in Mario Kart DS or Wii in forever. Also, the car customization in this game is amazing, I've never seen something like it. 20:40 The tracks Athens Dash and Daisy Circuit also have the piranha plant plyboards. But the one in Athens is never worth it, and the one in Daisy Circuit is always worth it, so not much decision making there.

"Lego 1K Drive" would've definitely been a more appropriate name for the sequel

Fun fact about the shortcut in 20:14: You don't really need the shield to pass through that wall. The game checks if a human player has the shield active and if so, it blinks and lets anyone pass through it. A CPU can't do it of course, but a rival human player can. I learned this the hard way when racing my friend who used MY active shield to get through there. One thing that annoys me a bit about the game is that the car building lacks green bricks (and other colors too, but especially green).

Crazy how many people grew up with this game! I grew up with Lego Racers 2 and never really enjoyed Lego Racers 1 but I never realized just how different the 2 were

Hearing someone talk about Lego Racers in 2024 gave some whiplash. Used to play the hell out of it with my cousin on the N64. I always thought the different parts had different hidden stat values, and would pick the fantasy theme cause it was the "fastest."

In general I hate the term "Can't be made today" because usually it can be but the people behind it are too scared to do it. However, I do agree you make some compelling arguments. As a lego fan I do bemoan the fact that Ninjago is pretty much the only franchise theme that didn't exist somewhere else first. Sure, I love the Star Wars sets and I just preordered the Zelda set, but back in the 80s I loved the Pirates theme. It was so much fun. The Pirates of the Carribbean theme, not so much as they were just scenes from the movie. They didn't have their own identity like the old Pirates. I'd rather have Lion Knights than Lord of the Rings. I'd rather have Blacktron than Star Wars. Lego needs to get its identity back before something like Lego Racers "Smash Bros" style character setup again.

Hugely underrated channel, keep making amazing work dude.

I can honestly say that Lego Racers was the first game that ever scared me. So many things in this game caused 5 year-old me great distress. All the bosses, those Mummy things, the horror themed tracks, this game's got real jumpscares too. Can't recall playing any other game with the same sort of aesthetic as Lego Racers, and this video's the first time I'm hearing about that shield shortcut. Maybe an indie dev out there could work some of this game's ideas into their own thing

Wanted to point out ModNation Racers which is the closest we got to Lego Racers

The only recent game that was attempted like this was LEGO Legacy: Heroes Unboxed. It was a single-player focused, free-to-play mobile game similar to Raid: Shadow Legends. It had mostly classic characters like Basil, and you could unlock their sets for bonuses and trivia. But the game did poorly, they added Ghostbusters to try to get licensed IP in there, and now it shut down.

I'm with you on Basil the Batlord - wish I could have had one of those sets too

For as much as I've played Lego Racers back in the day, I never new how in depth the item system was. It's still my favorite to this day, but never new it was this skill based and varied

I wish they supported their original themes more now, I watched so many cool themes fade in favor of big IPs.

Nice video. They actually had a system like you describe in Sonic R where you paid a certain amount of rings to access shortcuts. I never got the chance to play it in multiplayer, but it's possible it could have balanced things for people towards the back.

holy crap that was the biggest nostalgia trip ever

Lego Racers is one of my favorite games of all time. I still remember the day we went out to the store to buy it. On our first day playing, we couldn’t even beat Captain Redbeard. When we first beat him, it was SO exciting to unlock the next level.

I mean the answer seems obvious to me. Have static power-ups, but you get upgrades upfront if you're behind. For something like Lego Racers specifically it'd probably be better to use distance instead of placing, so like First Place will only ever get the bricks they pick up, there's a range behind First Place that also only gets the bricks they pick up, but behind that range picking up a colored brick comes with a bonus white brick, behind that has two bonus white bricks, and at the extreme end behind that (like "you've already been lapped by first" behind that) gets three white bricks for free when getting a colored brick so that catching up with an insta-warp is possible. Alternately, spamming cages is possible if being a menace is more important than winning. Also, Triple A is very bad and I don't want it to exist anymore.

This was the first game I 100% played through as a kid. Getting Vroni Volt's car was insanely difficult as kid. You had to near perfectly execute every racetrack + powerups👀

subbed after the DKR reference. great and intelligent vid!

This video was like being curb-stomped by forgotten nostalgia, in the best way. Thank you for making it!

Thank you for such an in-depth analysis on what looked like an uber fun game when I was a child. I loved lego pc games, Racers, Stunt Rally, Rock Raiders, Legoland, Chess, and another where you could build stuff from bricks. Those were the times.

Great video! To add to the list at 15:20: we have DREAMZzz now too. Still not a long list but it's something. I like that you went super detailed on the shortcuts. Never really thought about how it would work in a multiplayer setting. I love the fact that people still remember this game fondly. We can only wish that they create something similar for the modern times. I've recreated the intro animations of the game but with modern graphics, to hopefully show Lego how cool this game was and maybe it sparks a move from them. But we can only dream. 😋

Great video Tin Sensei! As a seasoned LEGO Racers speedrunner I can tell you you did it justice. Here's some memorable things I wanted to mention: 8:49 This is what we call a "Flakes moment" (Don't come after me Flakes😂) 12:41 I applaud you for this amazing joke. 13:22 "LEGO Racers was basically the Super Smash Bros. of LEGO." I never thought of this myself this way, but truer words have not been spoken about the game. It's truly how it felt playing this as a kid. I think I will quote this many times from now. As a fellow video editor I can only praise you for putting this video together so well. Cheers and I'll stick around for the future!

To make a Lego Racers style power-up system work for multiplayer, you'd need to make some changes, even more so than time trial did. Yes, you can give an advantage to players that lag behind: You'd just make the "initial" set of power-ups that spawn in one location different from the set that can replace them. And if you make lapping impossible, then that gives you a short period of time between rounds where you can reset power-ups from their "re-spawned" ones to their "initial" set. Obviously you'd use that to give the lead player(s) less greens (and 1/3 or so less yellows). Also, you can introduce randomness without completely abandoning the "pick your color of choice" system. Each spawn location can have a random spawn set (instead of always spawning reds or whites as in single player). Both of the suggestions so far make it so that you still get what you pick up, but what you can pick up will vary from race to race. And there's nothing keeping you from introducing a "rainbow colored" brick, that will turn into one of the 4 colors on pickup. And maybe a black brick, that has a chance to turn into either a white OR one of the 4 colors, making it a gamble to pick it up if you already have your color of choice. And nobody would complain if the chances of getting greens from those depended slightly on situation (you being in the lead/it being from an "initial" or "re-spawned" set, pick up location, ..., the date being April 1st or Friday the 13th). And finally, there's nothing keeping the devs from making the warp less powerful when you're in the lead. Nobody would complain if the warp seemed to take you random distances in MP. (And the speed boost multipliers could also be changed depending on where you were when you activated them. Nobody likes rubber-banding in normal drive mode; but speed boosts are something you get extra, and getting less extra feels less annoying than having something taken from you.) Also, everything you say about shortcuts is true, except for one thing: They can't really be hidden, because you can just see other players take them.

The only other racing game I saw go this hard on the shortcuts was BEETLE ADVENTURE RACING for the N64. That game was built around opening up massive shortcuts and that is exactly why I loved it so much!

ive never heard such an in-depth analysis on any lego game ever

Seems the algorithm started recommending this video, and I am glad it did. I have always loved versatile or upgradeable power ups in kart games, it made me remember ModNation Racers as well.

Banger video, glad to have gotten this randomly recommended

Great video, pal 😄 Lego Racers was & is a really special game to me - as a little kid we rented it back-to-back from the local library for weeks on end and I adored it. I spent a lot of hours playing with my dad, and to this day I know all the tracks and all the music. It felt like a real feat to complete all the circuit races, and I still remember getting Veronica Voltage's car set. Honestly my most treasured gaming memories are from this game. I still loved Lego Racers 2, but it didn't have the same simple charm

Honestly, I always get very excited when I see people talk about the old Pre-LEGO Star Wars games. Sure a decent bit of it is because of nostalgia, and these games haven't all aged the best as you highlighted very well, but it's nice to see people still being passionate about them (myself included). Great video and keep up the good work ^^

Kirby's air ride has the enemies in the same area but trying to catch them is the problem.

Speaking of paying to use shortcuts, I feel I have to bring up Split/Second. That racing game that disney interactive put out right before it was shuttered. The balancing that they did I thought was really well executed. Because you had to decide on using the "currency" to either destroy the other racers and set them back, or use it to move up in position or widen your lead using shortcuts. Hands down still one of my favorites.

Dude, THANK YOU. I forgot all about this game and you just opened a floodgate of memories. I absolutely loved this game as a kid.

Lego Racers was and always will be my favorite kart racer, excellent work explaining how complex the game system is!

Not a Lego fan, more of a KZfaq videos on games fan, and this is top quality

I never knew that on a moon level you have to look and remember gate colors from a screen. I always used sound clue: they always make a series of beeps when you pass this area and beep tone corresponds to blue/red gates.

Always love seeing small creators going this deep into such niche content and producing something so informative and high quality.

I agree with you about the living nostalgia that those early games had because of the crossover-ness of physical LEGO play. That's why I'm making my LEGO game concept so I can relive the old themes the way I imagined them to be. One of my back burner tasks was to make a simple racing mage so I might have to take some tips from LEGO Racers that you pointed out.

inb4 this blows up, amazing vid! Great quality content

Wow, this was a fun throwback. I loved this game and played it nonstop with a friend when it came out in 1999. I also adored Lego Alpha Team which is never talked about but introduced me to puzzle games that I still love today.

I could see an indie racing game with similarities to Lego Racers happening. Like the same kind of shortcut system and customization of that game.

a modern release of lego racers would be so unbelievably fire

I have a core memory of being in daycare, crowded around a pc with a bunch of other kids my age watching somebody play and shouting “USE IT” all in unison whenever a warp was in play. I had no idea what was going on and was enthralled. This game was the original hype creator and is without a doubt what induced my love for video games

It was crazy all the things you had to know to be good at this game, like the combination door and using the cannon to open shortcuts. Because some of the bosses use those shortcuts you learn them pretty quick. Really nice touch.

7:05 thank you for explaining how the Magma Moon shortcuts worked. I suspected it had something to do with the red/blue lights but could never figure out what the pattern was.

As a dedicated LEGO fan, who grew up with this game, and has many of the sets that were in the game, this really was an amazing video. It spoke to my heart.

Grip Combat Racing is pretty good about shortcuts, not a cart racer I know, but it's the first modern thing, that came to my mind. Most shortcuts have you trade off safely passing an obstacle with doing it the more risky way. You also have traps that you can shoot with missiles to trigger them. It also has a pretty cool mechanic, where you have two item slots and based on the situation you can upgrade one of the items with the other, freeing up another spot. This enables you to strategize a bit more.

I LOVE your Mario Kart ideas at the end of the video. The Mario Kart series could use these kind of shortcuts on their tracks.

I grew up with lego racers, and this video absolutely nails every single part of what made it so cool. You evidently did your research and everything is well thought out. Awesome watch, subbed!

7:38 WHAAAT I never knew about that one! 8:31 How did I never discover that one either?? I traced up and down that track all the time as a kid looking for a shortcut

Outstanding video. It did my head in having the clip of the warp transition to the mountain biking. I also loved the "hey!" from Voltage when Basil stile the green brick. Fun fact at 14:30 in the cinematic the colour of Rocky Racer's arms are reversed. Ingame his left arm is blue and the right is red. It's been a 2 and a half decade long debate about whether RR is Ausie or not and I guess we now have confirmation. I partially agree with your conclusions about why the LR powerup system won't (and hasn't) been created in a modern game. I think that a brand new IP called Rego Lacers could made and be everything Lego Racers was and more... It could be a truely amazing game... That no one would buy. It's not marketable at all in 2023. A single-player cartoon racer just won't sell. It may have a niche audience, i.e. just me, but LR was made when multiplayer racers were still being popularised and a single player cartoon racer was acceptance. Well done on the video and thanks for covering such an underrated game!

The original Lego Racers was one of my favourite games for a long period of my childhood. The powerup system and the way it made you strategise was one of my favourite features. Bounced completely off Lego Racers 2, don't remember playing it enough to have many strong memories of it.

The color-based shortcut was really interesting! I hope we see something like that in a modern racing game

18:38 For Diddy Kong Racing, not counting its re-release remake on DS, it is supposed to get sequel treatments. However, because its developer Rare was purchased by Microsoft, all of its sequel plans were canceled

Sometimes I see long forgotten things from my youth and a certain part of my brain feels funny, and seeing that bat-helmet definitely did that!

The shortcuts remind me of Sonic Riders. That game was also very creative.

How do you only have just over 3k Subs? This was exceptional. The game was great shortcuts are my favourite thing about racing games

Great video. I must say you are missing one potential spiritual successor, and that's Modnation Racers! Same power up system, same type of shortcuts, and same focus on customization.

I loved Lego Racers when growing up. My brothers & I sank hours into that game.

That theme song… made me feel like a kid again. I remember playing that game as a kid. Thank you so much for the nostalgia.

damn, i had that bat helmet! This gave me so many flashbacks to my childhood. Awesome stuff my man!

I miss that the older Lego models where very simple. Like they didn't have to make a whole set of specialty parts. Most of the sets were made out of parts that are common and could be found in other sets. Like rocket racer's car for instance, it was made out of common bricks. Unless you count the jet engines, they didn't have to make a whole new piece to make it look cool. 2k fills some nostalgia void but not fully. It has the spirit of making something out of nothing but it feels sullied by the fact it has so many more parts available to use.

16:59 don't think I didn't notice the Streets of Sim City music 👀

Thanks for your very clear thoughts on a game I distantly remember being very enjoyable. Kudos. There was so much replayability to Lego racers, I might go and give it a try again sometime.

always loved this game, it’s great seeing a video on it! (plus the On Cinema reference is very appreciated)

to be fair, I think it's good that they bounced around, like a young person doing different jobs to figure out what they like, they also did original things each time. we got new stuff., which is one of the biggest issues in games nowadays. Why not lego racers 2? I loved 2. Was 1 better? in its own way... but I think it was good that they branched out every time.

LR2 had shortcuts... it's been too long since I played to recall the exact tracks, but Mars and Arctic had some very notable shortcuts that were usually shorter (well, duh) but had no powerups or avoided the repair zones (and repair zones almost always involved taking a longer path than ignoring repair.) I think LR2 is really slept on, because it had unique mechanics of its own, such as the vehicle destructibility and how that played into map design. I never played LR1, but given the gameplay I've seen of it for all these years I think I'd basically always prefer LR2's setup and maps.

Your explanation of multiplayer considerations at the end got me thinking, and I had an idea that may be a little bit stupid. Randomized shortcuts. Each track has 12-15 shortcuts made for it, and for each race, 3-6 shortcuts were available for use, but were completely randomly selected. It'd mean you'd have to actively pay attention to which ones are available in the moment, or miss it and go for it in the next lap. The main issue I can think of with this would be speedrunning, as it'd be entirely rng at this point, but maybe single player modes have set shortcuts that aren't random. Just a little idea I had.

Thank you for the great video. This was my first racing game. My dad and I used to play this a lot when he came back from work. Interesting perspective. Looking forward to more content from you.

I miss the feeling lego racers 1 gave me.. Was great diving back into it in the form of this video tho!

W video

Time for an indie dev to make the true sequel of Lego Racers then. Sounds like a perfect fit. A highly skilled speedrun focused single player fist game? That's a perfect description of Neon White too, so it's actually feasible for some to make that game and be at least be a modest success.

Lego Racers was completely unique (as far as I know) in that it allowed you to _choose_ what powerup you got by selecting which color brick you picked up, instead of being given something random. It made the game strategic, so that you could choose a more offensive approach with a red brick if you were behind, or defensive with a blue brick if you knew that Gypsy Moth just picked up Homing Rockets (again). Yeah, it made a lot of races really lopsided once you learned how and when to use the warp, but the lopsidedness was what made it so fun! And it was part of what made the hosting champions seem unbeatable until you learned their strategies. I was soooo disappointed when the sequel completely abandoned this mechanic.

Did anyone else like Lego games before Traveler's Tales made licensed Lego movie games? I really enjoyed the classics like Rock Raiders, Lego Racers and especially Lego Island. I liked playing with the toys too, my favorite were the Johnny Thunder sets which drew inspiration from Indiana Jones. On another note I wish Traveler's Tales made more non-Lego games too.

Lego Island mentioned🫡

You've blown my mind - I thought I knew all the shortcuts back in the day, but you've taught me two more, plus explained how the moon base doors shortcut actually worked

I got to play this game at some computer camp and I was never able to find it afterwards until I just gave up looking after a few years. This was an awesome stroll down memory lane.

I miss ModNation Racers

Lego Racers is great but you forgot to mention one major flaw. The power-up bricks all look the same except for the color. Making them indistinguishable for color blind players, which is about 5% of people. Quite an oversight imho

Seeing these shortcuts has blown my mind! Played this to death when I was younger and had no clue!

Boy I sure did forget about this childhood classic until this video came across my timeline. Thanks for the awesome video!

This was an insightful video to watch, and to add to it, Crash Team Racing on the PS1 very much was a single player focused kart racer with shortcut systems much like Lego Racers, including challenges and non-racing/battle modes to earn unlockables from as well. It did also have a well developed multiplayer side to it as well, but its single player campaign mode was definitely the core of CTR.

This was really insightful, great analysis of a classic. I grew up playing Racers and loved everything about it.

One way to make a comeback mechanic for a Lego racers style game is to scale the effectiveness of each power up by the distance between you and the first player, with the first place racer getting the base level effectiveness of each power up. The farther ahead the lead player is, the stronger your power ups would be, maybe you warp farther or your attacks hurt the other players more… the better #1 is doing, the harder it is for that person to keep the lead. And it’s different from a position based scaling where last place in a 12 person race gets 12x the effect or something because if 2nd place was 2 laps behind, then a 2x effect of something isn’t going to catch you up to anyone. The advantage of having nobody to block your power ups is that they become less effective than everyone else, and the disadvantage of getting power ups blocked by the people ahead of you is that the ones you do get are more effective

Such a great video analysis of one of the top games of my childhood! Thanks for bringing back this nostalgic memories. Also the Lego Island Games. I had so much fun with it as a kid. I almost forgot about it. Thank you ♥