Nexo Knights and the Big Bang Theory

Bits and bricks. Welcome to Bits and bricks, a podcast about all things Lego games. I'm Ethan Vincent and I'm Brian Crescenti. Together we look back at the rich 25 year history of Lego games, chat with early developers and seasoned studios who have all tackled the creation of video games for one of the most popular and respected toy companies in the world, the Lego group. In the beginning, there is nothing, which exploded. I'm not sure that's exactly how that goes. What? Yeah, yeah it is. Very pratchett in his take on the Big Bang. What did you think I was talking about? Ah, yes, okay, I get it. The Big Bang, the swirling start of everything, well, depending on who you ask, a great TV show and the nickname for a very specific sort of Lego group creation. And that is a big part of what we're going to be talking about in today's episode, Big Bangs. Yes, specifically the explosive birth of Nexo Knights, a trans-media property starring futuristic knights who span TV shows, video games, books, magazines and toys. But before we share the story of Nexo Knights, how it came into focus, took off with the bang and then ended with the fizzle, let's explain the whole Big Bang thing. You know, Ethan, it would have sounded so much better if I'd said that with my Texas accent. Big Bang thing. The Lego group created a lot of fangs. Thanks Ethan. I appreciate that. There's many figures to theme sets, video games, television shows, books, movies, the Lego group is involved in just a ton of stuff. And yeah, you know what? When all of that coalesces into one property, that's totally a Big Bang. And that brings us to Daniel Mathiason, a former Lego group employee who, during the creation of Nexo Knights, spent quite a bit of time working at the company as a partnerships and innovations director in the front end innovation team. From that position, he was involved in a few Big Bangs. A Big Bang is really an expression about how much marketing effort is put behind given product loans. It's kind of like what comes first. Do you have a Big Bang and therefore you have a TV show or do you set out to develop a TV show and therefore you can justify your Big Bang here? We have done this before. We know how to build a Big Bang and we can do it again. So we set out early to actually develop that. Another way of doing it would be of course saying, okay, so all the play things that we have, what is strong enough to be cared for. Here we deliberately went out and said, we want to develop this, we want to have this. And it needs to be so strong that it can carry a huge investment of both digital experiences, digital physical experiences, a TV show, install experiences, the whole thing. But end of the day, it's an expression of investment willingness in the development and the go-to market campaign. Big Bang's have been around for a while at the Lego Group. One of the first was actually Bionicle, which was talked about extensively in its own episode earlier this year in the podcast. No, that's one of my favorites. Yeah, no, it was, it really was. It's a great one. If you haven't listened to it, go have a listen. So some say that the 2000 release of that property saved the Lego Group. Whether that's true or not, it certainly had an impact on how such original IP reviewed within the company. Today, the best known Big Bang is probably Ninjago, which was launched in 2011 in an attempt to double the sales of an earlier Big Bang, Lego Atlantis, which came out in 2010. Today, Ninjago remains one of the Lego Group's longest running and most successful original brands. But that didn't stop folks on the front-end innovation team at the Lego Group from trying to top it. Wait, what? Yeah, I know. It's crazy. Lego Legends of Chimo was actually developed to replace the Ninjago theme set. But it only lasted two years after launching in 2013. Next, the team decided to look into a theme set based on futuristic nights. That's where Daniel comes back into our story. I was working in the very early development of the Nationalites and the team responsible of coming up with new front-end innovation. We called it new play themes for Lego Homegrown IPs. So that's the group where Ninjago and Chimo and Nationalites have come out of. And I was setting up a digital physical innovation team where we together with our colleagues were innovating around the play for next-door nights. What we wanted to have was a diverse portfolio. And obviously there's some play themes around Star Wars and Batman and some of the IPs that we get in third-party IPs coming into the company. In the early days, there was also something more non-descript play themes like Castle. In the last 15 years, it's been more and more deeper in engaging stories such as Ninjago and Chimo or next-door nights. And those were fully-fledged IPs that we wanted to establish out there with the kids and then offer our play theme around that universe, that story universe and IP. And before next-door nights, those big bangs had been in the jungle, was really the first big bang that took off since a barnacle. And Chimo, there was another team developing Lego Friends, which also became a big bang bet from that Lego group that turned out well. And then for the target group around boys, next-door nights was really that. And then we worked our way out from that IP thinking and all out into play experiences and seeing how can we combine this. The initial brief for next-door nights was to make a play theme that would be at the top of the wish list for boys in 2016. So the team researched its back catalog, looking for something they could use to create a new and captivating theme set. But the brief was really just a rough starting point. Creating something that could have the success, brought appeal, and longevity of a theme set like Ninjago also required figuring out what problem they were trying to solve with the new toys. And that brings us to the biggest challenge, predicting not just what boys would be interested in in 2016, but what they would be obsessed with in two years in the future. I have two kids. This is Daniel Matthias in speaking. And we are now August, and they don't know what they wish for Christmas this year, let alone in two years, right? So how do we figure out what kids want for Christmas two years down the road? There we have to tap into some of the things that are always true for kids. Engaging stories, the story universe, the play triggers. What is it that go into a successful play theme? We called it a "Playing Puzzle." When we look at the IP and the theme, what are interesting play dynamics that we can tap into and offer the kids that link up to this universe that we are trying to create. And all of these puzzles, we run ideation process, if you will, where we, with brainstorming session, trying to diverge and saying, well, it could also be this. It could also be this. One of the first things that the partnerships and innovation groups did was dip into the deep well that is the Lego Group's vast history. The idea of creating theme sets based on futuristic nights came up pretty early in the process. In fact, it was something that the Lego Group had played around with in the past, but never fully explored. It was important to get that thematic hook earlier on because it helps to shape the rest of the experience, including play. The process then expands to exploring all elements of the potential new set in parallel. The formula for us was doing that in parallel. So all the way from how we're going to communicate this, what are the hooks that we can use into the campaign to, what are the models that we are building, what is the type of role play that we want to tap into the more action based play in these materials. So in Jaguar, you had the spin us, what would an equal play offering B with us, etc. So all of these things are explored in parallel. And the things that work through continuously testing with the kids, the things that work, really led to onto and try to dig deeper into what are the core motivations for the kids, why does this work, how would it work with the direction the story is taking, how would it work with the digital experience. And that's a constant transparent development in each of these areas. So it's both a like a meter creative process and then each area driving their own process. With the big bang on their mind, the team also explored ways to grow nexonites beyond the physical and expand to things like a video game, including ideas like tying it to a digital tower defense game and a television show. But in the end, the team decided the best choice was to work in collectibility to the theme set. It's been hard for the legal group to introduce that play pattern for a number of years, but that baseball card play pattern that is so popular among kids could we introduce that in a way where it would fuel more play with the breaks, more play around the story and the universe. It's very much about each area in the team creating that diverse exploration and then coming back together and saying, where can we find commonality? What is it that hooks the kids when we test each our own experiences and try and where is the energy, what can we do? All of this work was being driven by a relatively small team of 25. The idea was to build up steam on the concept internally, passing it through a number of check-ins and presentations before giving the project an official green light and greatly expanding the team. There was also a lot of discussion about how the Transmedia property could be rolled out to toys, television and video games, at essentially the same time. So the big challenge for us when doing IPs like Nixonites or any of the homegrown IPs, is that they're completely new and fresh to the market, never seen before. And you have a very short amount of time to establish these IPs. And they need to compete with some pretty, pretty strong IPs out there, right? So these places need to compete with legal star wars, an IP that's been in the market for decades. And well established and well-loved by kids and parents alike. For it to become a big bang, you need to go out and establish this present and top of mind in the same target group as star wars. And just about as strong. And that push requires an enormous effort from everybody involved. And when we start a small team driving this innovation, the materials and the concept that we are developing needs to be really, really strong when we push it out from the early phases to what in the legal group called downstream, where the quote unquote normal machine takes over and the really efficient marketing machine that the legal group also is, starts pushing it out. That concept, both the play, the go-to market strategy, the communication, and everything needs to be so sharp that the entire company can get behind it and push it out. We went from a small team of 20-25 people to over 700 people across the company. So to get these 700 people who are mainly leads and core people around the company who will drive each of their own little area, to get them on the same page and push something new out through the machine, it needs to be extremely crisp very early on. That core team began the process in late 2013 and spent about two years in deep development. Those early phases included a lot of focus testing with children, as well as simply maturing the product internally. We wanted to be really mature, we wanted to push ourselves for that because it's heavy investments for the legal group to invest in TV shows and computer games, etc. So that maturity is really pushed early and that's fairly early on that we need to identify these key triggers with the kits. The capability that the legal group had built up in those years was really, you couldn't be sure that a big bang that we launched would get to the same level of Niddiago that became an evergreen IP, but you could make sure that whatever you brought out had a really high success rate for being a blockbuster. The ingredients for that you needed to be able to see very early on. Then on May 15th, 2015, Nexo Knight's got the official internal green light. At Scrapi little team of 25, slowly expanded to more than 200. Now all of those people had a lot of things to do as Daniel told us. The parallel I used to draw for people would be whenever the procedure needs to have a new police station, we pretty much know how to make a police station and mature at box like that. So when an innovation project is at the same maturity level that we can give it to the bigger organization and saying it's this that we need to have, it's testable with the kids, we know what to do. Then the model builders that's good at maturing the models and the box designers and everything they take over and they now own their idea and the concept and can drive it forward to a finalization. And at that point in time, there's still a lot of innovation going on. It's just the hard questions that have been tackled, hard foundational questions that have been tackled in the early innovation team. Mark Hofmeier has a long history writing for television. His work includes time on the power rangers that 90s Spider-Man the animated series, even a couple of Lego video games. But when the Lego group contacted him in 2014, it was to discuss an upcoming television show tied to an emerging Lego theme set still under wraps that was going to be based on futuristic pirates. That's right. Because Mark hadn't signed on yet to write the show and backstory, the Lego group needed to give him a fake theme to show what he could come up with. They were looking for someone to help them develop a property and do the writing for the show. So I did a test for them that was not based on Nexonites, but was based on what they called sort of an adjacent idea and it happened to be sort of futuristic pirates. So I delivered to them, I remember delivering to them, it was basically like what we call a miniature Bible. So in other words, you create a Bible for the show that usually lays out everything about the show. It'll tell you basically in Ellen Capsuley and a couple of pages what the show's concept is, then you'll have a section on the characters, you'll have a section on the setting, you'll talk about the stories and then story arcs and the complete Bible for Nexonites, that was over 50 pages. I mean, it was very detailed. But I think for the initial test, I probably delivered them 10 or 15 pages of stuff that were just sort of shortened versions of that. Here's some characters. I think I even did a little bit of dialogue. I did a little miniature script thing in which I did the pirate captain also has a home life and so he's got a wife and kids and it sort of put upon as a pirate king because hey, I got to deal with all the family problems and also I'm out there moroting. And so I think they kind of liked that sort of fun tongue in cheek approach to it and it felt very Lego television show sort of. And so that was really fun. And then I also remember as part of that pitch, I actually even drew some pictures of what I would imagine a futuristic pirate world to look like. And so that was kind of fun too. The Lego group loved Marx approach to giving that pirate king a sense of identity outside of being well pirate king. So they hired him on and then invited him in early 2015 to where they were holding focus tests for a private unveiling of the real theme set he'd be working on next on nights. I didn't get to see any of what it was until I got into the focus test room and they were like under covers and they pulled the covers off to show me what they were. I was so happy. I was I was like as a kid who had played with Lego toys so happy to see these things. I was just super enamored with the four tracks. You know, this sort of cool rolling fortress and it had tank tracks on it and and and not only that, but they had all the other vehicles laid out too. But I'll tell you a fun story about the four tracks that very first day. And I want to say it was like a Monday. They usually ran their tests from like Monday through through Wednesday. And then they had a debrief on Thursdays. But on that first Monday, I had looked through the four tracks and obviously I couldn't take any pictures or anything, but I was just looking through in my mind. And one of the Lego designers he built a little kitchenette into the four tracks, right? Because it was supposed to be a complete self-contained living environment, right? It was a rolling fortress and he had a little chef bot in there, right? He had a little mechanical chef in there and on the first day of testing, I noticed when they would just there was a period where they would just let the kids sort of look at the toys and explore them and kind of and I noticed several of the boys just looking at the chef bot and like playing and commenting, you know, oh, look he's got chef and there's a kitchen and I realized because I have two sons and I realized that, you know, yeah, kids now are really into these cooking shows, right? They love watching like all these shows on the food network and stuff. And so I then decided that we had to have that chef bot we gave him a name, chef Eclare and we decided that Axel on the next one nights would be, you know, not only the biggest toughest guy, but either. We'd also like to cook and we did several episodes about the fact that he was a chef. You Axel, why are you always in your armor? I like to be prepared. For what? For dinner! Nothing like a good meal to help prepare for taking some gestural bite, right, Axel? It was really fun that that first day to me being introduced to it just sort of became an inspiration for just tons of ideas about the show and looking at it and it was really, really fun. After winning Mark over with that unveiling, the Lego group flew him to Billon to work with the team. During that five day stent, he and others on the project spit bald ideas and nailed down the basic concepts around exonites. On the Friday of that week, they presented the story ideas to everyone involved in the project and the approach was approved. During that time, they worked on the basic plot line, the backstory and eventually they even came up with the final name for the theme set. It turns out it wasn't always exonites. Initially, it was just a knight and there were knights of knight and then at one point in time, they were just sort of called future knights and so we were struggling around to find a really good name and because it being a business, you have to legally clear names and so you have to make sure that you have names that work in the Lego group's case around the world. You have everybody and their brother in every country on the face of the planet wanting to play with Lego toys and so you end up having to come up with names that really, really work and so I think it was probably six months and we finally, we all sort of decided we liked exonites. There was some back and forth about it and then it was okay, can it clearly, legally, can it work? We liked it because it sounded futuristic, which is that was the challenge too. Can we tag a word onto it that sounds futuristic? because night and we were sort of like, okay, it sort of works, but it's like, you know, it also sounds weird to say like the nights of night and, you know, it's, okay, there's a lot going on there and night and also sounds like light and and so we were just we were just going back and forth and so when we came up with nexonites, I think we like everybody liked the alliteration of it and it sounds, you know, it sounds like nexus. And I think nexus nights was one of them that was proposed at 1.2 that, you know, let's come up with something that sounds really futuristic and stuff so yeah, we finally ended up with nexonites. Nexonites! Oh my! Mark spent the following months building the complex and detailed story bible for the nexonites and breathing life into the characters that the team created. One of the key characters for the series is monstrocks and the book of monsters that he is turned into. Goodie goodie night quick page 205 with the magic staff over me conjure a monster. The idea behind the nexonites evil talking book has a surprisingly dark inspiration. They had originally had, you know, the, the, our villainous bad guys were going to be, you know, it was gestro that the sort of gestor gone bad and it was going to be this book of monsters. And we were sort of trying to figure out how to make that work out and Tommy and Dres and is a huge collector of like toys and lots of movie memorabilia and his house and Denmark is fitted out like a toy museum and I'm sure as he says when he dies he's going to burden his children with having to dispose of all the stuff he's collected. One of the things he had was a latex life size version of the necronomicon from evil dead and of course we had been working for a couple of days on the show and talking through concepts and he comes out with this thing. And the version he had of it you could actually put your hand in it had that face on it and you could make it talk and we were all pretty punchy right so I put my hand in it and I started making it talk. But I started making it talk like Stanley because I've worked with Stanley a lot so I started just talking like this and say you know here's the thing I know I'm a book i'm really evil i'm fullest bells look you're going to be so sorry you check me out of this library here in night and okay just let me tell you that right now. And we sort of hit on the concept of like hey what if what if the book of monsters is the real bad guy and it's sort of converted gestro and it talks and it does all this evil stuff and so that's how that came about was just sort of intrinsically out of like kicking stuff around and just having thinking time. More monsters make more monsters. Mark collaborative people working directly on the designs used for the physical sets not just with other writers. Yeah I mean a lot of it there's a lot of cross pollination that goes there and some of it you can say like okay well that you know I can look at stuff and go like that came directly from the toy designer so like I said you know them putting a little chef bought in the kitchen they just sort of did that as you know dressing and fun and it looked really cool. And then we were able to roll that into an actual character right and give me a personality and make him fun. And then we would come up with stuff that then would be translated into a toy stuff and so there was a lot of working together on all of that and they would come up with then we have a cool concept for doing this kind of vehicle for the next season or we have a cool concept of this kind of monster. And so it was really incredibly cooperative. It was really fun because it was truly building an IP world with both the creative end of it and then sort of the creative a toy building end of it the master builders there. One of the big secrets for the developing show was how the team had come up with the way to achieve the early vision of making the theme set feel like a collectible that was done with the use of shields and there were 150 shields located throughout the kingdom of night and found in sets the website magazines and books and the television show. And all of this was tied to the properties game which let players scan the shields to collect them and unlock special powers. Mark loved that idea. They showed that idea to me they were very you know it was sort of a highly secretive thing that they had this shield power idea. And so when they first demoed it for me I was like really blown away. They had explored that technology of being able to use the camera on an iPad or an iPhone to make things appear three dimensional they had done that with a toy catalog. I want to say the year before so they were really sure that this technology would work because it was basically taking what would have been like a technology behind a QR code but putting it on a shield. And so they could quite easily make those powers go into the game version right the game that went along with the next so nights world. And so I thought that was really cool because then you could get more powers by you know each character had had unique powers and each object you would then go get had unique powers and so it was really cool because then when I wrote some of the books connected to the series on the cover of the book after you bought the book and unwrapped it on the inside of the back cover I believe was you had a unique power the game with the book that you would only get if you got the book and so. That to me was really really cool that you could generate that stuff and you could add to your arsenal of unique sort of nexop hours and then coming up with the whole idea that they would hold up their shields and and Merlock this sort of like computerized wizard would be downloaded. The video game for nexonites launched weeks before the release of the theme sets first physical toys it's actually a clever idea they did this to ensure that once the product started rolling out with those collectible scannable shields. People would have the mobile game available to start collecting them the game Lego nexonites Marlock 2.0 was seen as the connecting tissue that united all the disparate elements of this wide ranging new property together it was critically important and especially when we started getting to the point where we said we want to push to collect ability play this is Daniel Matthias and speaking we wanted for the kids to collect powers in the play theme that is expressed by the legal breaks to put into the shield they represent the powers in the TV. Show the shield changes the surface when the nights power up but we wanted these powers to be something that they could engage with with any touch point if it was in the parks if it was in the shops if it was in a magazine they should be able to collect these powers. The place that you then collected these powers was in the app for that we could have chosen to to simply make a library of powers but the next very natural step of course is when when you have the power is not worth anything on on unless you can use it. So where do you use your power? Where is it that you get to live out that power moment and that became a digital gaming experience. The power to defeat just rose for bitten power is in your hands with a new combo nexopowers you can choose any three you want to create your own unique attack. When Matt's prom came on to the project in 2014 as a production director there had already been early prototype development work done on Merlock 2.0 by a studio in Copenhagen called Cape Copenhagen. So they had been creating early prototypes of the core game loop which was a simple kind of battle game and they had also been doing like simple markups of the meta game which was this power collection loop and then they had been doing a lot of play testing with kids to try to understand like could they get this engagement loop of like I'm going to play the game I see what the powers do in the game now I'm going to go out into the real world to a legal store or to my toy box. To scan new powers into the game so that I can use them in the game so they they had kind of been working closely with the team and beyond to prove out that game loop back in 2015 when the nexonites project got the green light the Lego group set out to find a more established game developer to create the game. Three different teams sent in proposals all based on the same fake futuristic pirate IP that the company used with mark and the Lego group chose Fremas studio in Quebec. It turned out that a lot of work that Frema did for the pirate pitch actually couldn't translate for nexonites. Even though it selected the best team they basically had to go back and redo their whole pitch for nexonites. This is Manspran speaking and so I think that was a little bit of a surprise to us that it didn't go as smoothly as we hoped. Some of those standoff mechanics with the battleships that was pretty cool to their experience so they had to start from scratch and you know the timeline was very fixed because you know the Lego theme was going to launch at a specific time. So there wasn't really a lot of time for early kind of like concept development and play exploration and so I remember that being a lot of pressure on the team that kind of like they just had to succeed there wasn't any room for that wasn't much room at least for experimentation and failure it kind of had to work in the first go. So that was a bit challenging but in the end they really succeeded I believe and then of course there was the challenge of the technology right because the game needed to be able to scan these powers and the game needed to run on all sorts of different phones from cheap Android phones to the latest iPhone and everything in between. And so we actually asked a different group of technology companies to pitch for that technology and in the end it was Qualcomm that won that with a custom version of their view for a technology. which could identify the shields that were all unique and then kind of read the hidden code on them and so that you could unlock the power in the game. And so all of these things had to work together. The game team was dependent on the technology, which didn't quite exist yet, and yeah, everything needed to run on the same device. So that was also a little bit challenging. Fortunately, the LEGO Group had a growing level of expertise in incorporating digital play into physical toys. It's work on things like Life of George, which we spoke about in an earlier episode this season, prepared them for some of the challenges they might face with nexonites and the shield scanning. Here's Daniel Matthias from talking about that. Oh, yeah. I was sitting in the leadership teams overseeing these experiences. So that was definitely part of the roadmap and the exploration. At the time, it was a very collaborative atmosphere between the different groups on how we could do these things. It was more the type of play that we had the teams explore that was different, but there was a good collaboration between the two groups. Actually, so much that I was sitting in truly the leadership teams. I was sitting in what was the future lab at the time looking at Life of George and fluid play in that context. And then I was sitting over in the call business in the play team innovation as well in that period. So we very much and very closely connected and collaborated on these experiences. Once Frima had the basic concepts for the game and some of the levels to play, they brought in Mark to ensure that the game would fit neatly into the broader picture of the toys, TV show, and its fictional world. Mark Hoffman explains. They had me actually write the script for it so that it would align with who the characters were and the things that they would say. And then the cool thing was we added stuff in the game that you wouldn't see in the show, because that was part of the world building of it was. We wanted to have stuff in the game that you wouldn't have in the show. We wanted to have stuff in the books that you didn't have in the games or in the show. And I wrote the actual script for the game. So I interacted with the game group. But it was after we had gotten all the-- we had finished the Bible for the television show and we had started a lot of the writing on the first season. And then the game group had been developing, you know, the levels and how the game itself worked. And then they had me come in and finish that off, you know, to do the actual scripting. As the production director, Mads had a unique bird's eye view on how things fit together. From his perspective, the TV show, the toys, the books, and the video game were equal partners in the experience. Mads' prom explains. Yes, I think that was the new thing that they were all sort of equal partners. That it wasn't toy first, as you can say, often is in the Lego group. All of these parts of the IP were equal. And so kids could arrive into the IP by watching the TV series or by being gifted the toy or by downloading the gaming app. And we kind of designed for all of those places to be starting points for the journey in the IP. And I think that also made it a very exciting project to work on being a game developer, because often in the Lego group, games can be a little bit of an afterthought. But for this development, it was very much at the center, or at least an equal player with everyone else. And it was a massive project group, right? There were people from the technology side, there were people from the gaming side, people from the toy side, people from the retail store side, and of course from the cartoon side. So all of these many, many different people had to work together to create this coherent universe. So that was really exciting. The Lego group announced at New York Comic Con in 2015 that the property would be rolling out starting on January 1, 2016, with 14 building sets. The Lego Nexo Knights Merlach 2.0 video game hit on December 19, 2015. And in February, the Lego group announced a partnership with Cartoon Network for the television show. Welcome to a world of advanced technology. [MUSIC PLAYING] robots and futuristic knights in love showing off our amazing-- Daniel called it a strong launch. The expectations that we in the innovation team had set up and the business case that we had presented, it lived up to that. So overall, I would call Nexo Knights a fairly good success. [MUSIC PLAYING] It was a big bang. It didn't become an evergreen. And a certain part in the development, it looked like we might have had the ingredients for an evergreen. The TV show seemed to work fairly well. The game seemed to work well. What I remember most clearly about the reception of Nexo Knights in those first six months, maybe after launch, was that this is Manspram speaking. The Lego group had had really big expectations for sales, and those weren't quite being met. And I think that's a little bit of a returning theme within the Lego group that the company had been experiencing with these double digit growths over a decade. I think at the time and so expectations were really that sales would just be fantastic. And when they weren't fantastic, because it was taking consumers and kids a little bit longer time to discover this new IP, then everybody was disappointed. And I think even though you can say, through the first year, the team kept working on next year's updates for the game and updates for the toy line and new TV series episodes on the momentum slowly started to be dialed down, because the sales weren't meeting expectations. And I think later on, we found out that one of the big things that we hadn't expected was that we'd really expected the TV to have a very big impact on kids discovering this new IP. And at that time, in 2016, streaming was already starting to take a very big bite out of TV. And so kids were discovering the theme as fast as we had hoped. And this meant that the ambition slowly, they were lowered. So some of the big updates that were going to come in year two and year three of the game and of the toys that were slowly like toned down or canceled. And then only I think in the third year of next year's nights, actually, it ended up being the theme that was delivering most growth at the LEGO Group. So there had really been a delay effect. But by that time, there wasn't a game development team on the product anymore. There wasn't a toy development team. And basically, everyone had moved on. And internally, it was seen a little bit as a failure that we had had to abandon. So I think that's my clearest memory of the internal interpretation of the launch. But then, thinking about how anecdotally, like when I've met kids and talked to them about their LEGO sets, next on nights, keep coming up as one of the things that they were really excited about. And where the game really brought the sets to life and added this magical layer on top of the toys that the toys weren't just a dead thing. There was this whole universe that came to life one should scan the toys. So I think my impression is that out in the real world, it was really well received. But inside the LEGO Group, many of us were disappointed with the sales. We were left with kind of like a little bit of a disappointed feeling. It's hard to reconcile that feeling internally that maybe next on nights wasn't doing very well with this external reception to the theme set in its longevity. In less than two years, there were 40 television episodes, more than 100 sets, a popular video game, a magazine, several books, and even a 40 film that debuted as a ride at LEGO Land Windsor Resort in 2016. But held up against the likes of Ninjago, the success of next on nights-- well, it sort of dims. I asked Mads Pram about that. Ninjago was always the bother who were trying to raise, right? And with Chima, the company went all in and still, even with an online game and TV show and all of those things, they didn't manage to make it as biggest Ninjago. And the same with next on nights. And I would say actually some of the teams that came after still were measuring those up against Ninjago. And I think that makes sense that when you do something, you would have to be better than what you've done before. But I think it's just really tough to beat these ninjas for one thing, because it's such a strong fantasy. But also because that IP has had so many years now to be established that it's almost like a multi-generational IP now. And that's really difficult to do in six months, right? So if we measure the success of an IP after the first six months and then abandon it, if it's not a success, then it's just going to be tough, right? I think we need to be a little bit more patient when we're seeding a new IP and maybe take a longer-- yeah, have a longer time horizon than six months. Daniel doesn't necessarily agree that the LEGO Group stopped production on next on nights too soon, or that the theme set didn't live up to its expectations. I don't know if LEGO pulled the puck too early on next on nights. Next on nights, to a last extent, delivered what was forecasted in the early days, could it have been more if all the different touchpoints had worked to the same extent that it had previously? Who knows? You can't go out and design when you launch a movie and say, this movie is going to be a classic. And you can't go out in the toy industry and say, OK, so this IP that we are launching now, that's going to be an evergreen. In the Jaguar, what's unique in that sense? And that's something like, if you can do that every decade that you're doing extremely well, you can't do that for every big bang launch. So that sense, if people had compared it to in Jaguar, I would say, that's a bit naive. I know that some of our executive stakeholders did that, said, well, we just need to do an in-general, but that's not even without knowing what it goes into making a hit like that. You are competing with IP such as Star Wars. It's being able to just do that and make a market impact is huge. Most players in the toy industry would give their left arm to have that capability to do that in-house. So I don't think you could find one player in the toy industry who would say that Nixonites didn't make an impact for that target group. It was a big launch. It did really well. From Mark's perspective, Ninjago's ongoing jet-fueled success did have an impact on Nexonites or at least the way its success was perceived internally. Sometimes when you do something that's that good and set the bar that high, people's expectations are that everything, you know, that maybe the next thing you create is going to be even better than that. And I think that's a hard standard to hit. When you're an international industry like the LEGO Group, you know, there's a lot of pressures to perform, you know, year after year, quarter after quarter, keep it going and to find something fresh and new. While the show was killed with season four, Mark and the team did have concepts in mind for future seasons, like setting an episode in the Old West. There were also plenty of hand-drawn concepts that were never brought to life. The team even left some fruit hanging for future episodes with plans of potentially pushing into a fifth and maybe sixth season and wrapping it up there. But that's not how it worked out. I get it. This is how the business works. And sometimes you don't get to fulfill your ultimate dreams of like, I want to wrap this up. And I, you know, I want to go do a bunch of more seasons. It's a huge, huge investment to make a television series, to make a LEGO toy line that is aligned with that television series to make books that are aligned with it to support it with video games. I mean, that's a huge, huge investment. And so sometimes it just comes down to, are there new ways we want to push ourselves? Are there new things we want to put our time and invest our masterbuilders' time and our creative group people in rather than this? Do we think we've given it a long enough run? And I'm really proud of how far we got to take it in the four seasons we did. Although Nexonites wasn't able to make the same transformative leap from successful big bang to thriving evergreen product, it left an impact on the LEGO group. It showed just how powerful a video game can be when tied and extrably to a theme set. And Mods told us that without the video game, Nexonites would have been just another theme set with a TV show. What made Nexonites magical was the game that tied everything together. And not only the core game loop of battling with the characters, but Mods made a game that allowed you to collect all of these powers and go on a Treasure Hunt in Legoland and look for hidden shields with unique powers that you could get or compare your collection with your friends and trade powers with your friends. So all of that went into making it something bigger than just a toy and a TV show. So for sure, the game had a very big impact on the IP. Bits and Bricks is made possible by LEGO Games. Your hosts are Brian Crescente and Ethan Vincent, producing by Dave Tach. Our executive producer is Ronnie Scherr, creative direction and editing by Ethan Vincent, research and writing by Brian Crescente, art direction by Nanan Lee, graphics and animations by Manuel Lindinger and Andreas Hartzinger, mixing and sound design by Dan Carlell, opening's Child Boises, Milo Vincent, music by Peter Primer, founder music.com and excerpts from the Nexonites TV series. We'd like to thank our participants, Mark Offfire, Daniel Mathiason and Mods Prom. We'd also like to thank the entire LEGO Games team. For questions and comments, write us at [email protected]. That's Bits, the letter N, then [email protected]. And as always, stay tuned for more episodes of Bits and Bricks. [Music]