Mindscape UK - Press News - Coming Soon Magazine

THE LEGO GROUP AND MINDSCAPE TURN LEGO BRICKS INTO BYTES ON CD-ROM

Adventures on Lego Island Combines Action, Fantasy & Building in the First LEGO CD-ROM Game

London, UK, January 25th, 1997 -- The LEGO Group, makers of the world's best-selling construction toys, and Mindscape, a leading publisher of consume software, today announced the upcoming worldwide release of Adventures on Lego Island, the first LEGO CD-ROM game for children ages six to 12.

A high-action fantasy and build game, Adventures on LEGO Island introduces kids to a LEGO world complete with dangerous missions, white- knuckle races, and more than 45 colorful characters, including a pizza- hungry villain.

Based on the LEGO SYSTEM Town Play Theme, Adventures on LEGO Island is the first CD-ROM game being developed by Mindscape and marketed under the LEGO brand name. The game will be available in the third quarter of 1997 in English, French, and German for an estimated street price of 29.99 British pounds.

Who's Who on LEGO Island

As the game begins, players are introduced to seven main characters: The Infomaniac, the host and helper on LEGO Island; The Brickster, the Island's bad guy, who creates chaos wherever he goes; Pepper, the skateboarding pizza delivery dude; his adoptive parents, Mama and Papa Bickolini, who operate the Island pizzeria and express their talents through song and dance; and Nick and Laura Brick, LEGO Island's favorite friendly constables.

Mulitiple Personalities

Each of the LEGO characters has specific character traits, skills, and foibles. With the exception of the Infomaniac and the Brickster, kids can "become" a character simply by click on it. Suddenly, they find out what it's like to live the life of a LEGO character from a first-person perspective.

Celebrity Voices

Mindscape conducted a nation-wide talent search to find voices for 46 characters and 1,200 lines of dialogue. The cast includes such well-known voices as June Forray, the voice of "Rocky" in the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, as Mama Bickolini; David Lander, "Squiggy" from TV's Laverne & Shirley as the Brickster and 13-year old John Morris, the voice of the beloved toy-owner "Andy", in Toy Story, as Pepper.

A Day in the Life of LEGO Island

Players explore LEGO Island by building vehicles, driving LEGO cars racing jet skies, riding bikes, and meeting other Island residents. From the gas station to the pizzeria to the racetrack, each location features interactive activities, hot spots, and gag animations. As players explore, LEGO characters pose questions that require them to make decisions that change the game's outcome. They might find themselves racing an opponent, delivering pizza on a skateboard, or zooming around on a jet ski to avoid hungry sharks! The Mindscape team intentionally designed the game with no predetermined order of events to encourage exploration and discovery.

Explore and Learn

On LEGO Island, there are no menus, buttons, or on-screen lists. Players use the mouse to navigate. They can customize their LEGO environment by clicking on people, animals, plants, and buildings to change their physical state.

A Challenge for All Ages

Adventures on LEGO Island is self-levelling, so players' decisions in the game determine the level of difficulty. Younger players may simply explore the Island and be entertained by the characters and activities. Older players are more likely to undertake challenges in LEGO races and participate in increasingly difficult missions.

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It...

The game's ultimate challenge comes when a combination of actions enables the Brickster to escape from jail, disassemble the Island's only helicopter, and proceed to deconstruct the Island. To stop him, players must use imagination and clues in the game to discover the missing bricks, reconstruct the helicopter, locate the Brickster, and help the police catch him. The final showdown involves a madcap chase, complete with flying doughnuts and spinning anchovy pizzas, with police officers Nick and Laura Brick in hot pursuit.

An Educational Perspective

Adventures on LEGO Island is a game based on sound educational principles, including character development, problem solving, and map reading. Mindscape modelled the personalities of the main LEGO characters on the seven areas of intelligence as defined by Harvard Professor Dr. Howard Gardner. Exploration on LEGO Island also reflects the influence of Dr. Seymour Papert, a Massachusetts Institute of TEchnology professor who believes that learning should involve exploration, detached from the right and wrong. Papert says this empowers children t explore their world with greater competency and confidence. Mindscape also worked with LEGO's education experts to ensure that the game reflects LEGO's attention to play values, imagination, and pedagogy.

It All Starts With Design

In creating LEGO Island, programmers, creative planners, illustrators, designers, scriptwriters, educations consultants, and kids worked hand-in-hand in the "LEGO Construction Zone" to create the twists and tricks of the Brickster, the Infomaniac, and friends. The development team generated many of the ideas from a full-scale model of LEGO Island, complete with buildings, tunnels, a racetrack, and a surrounding waterway. Mindscape travelled the world to recruit educational experts and kids to act as consultants, and continuously challenged the game designers' ideas and creations.

Technology

Bringing LEGO into the multimedia age required designers to implement new technologies as they were being developed. These tools made it possible to produce advanced 3D graphics, smooth animations, detailed lip synching, and non-linear game play.

Animation -- Adventures on LEGO Island features hours of full- motion animation, rendered so players can view characters in true 3D, from unlimited points of view.
Lip Synching -- Mindscape developed a proprietary technology that combines dialogue and voice files on the computer. It uses a 100,000 word vocabulary and more than 300 facial expressions to create the sounds of language, or phonemes. Mindscape will also use the phoneme technology to create foreign translations of the game in just a few weeks - a technique that will support LEGO Island's worldwide distribution.
Non-linear 3D Environment -- LEGO Island's full 3D environment enables players to walk forward, turn side-to-side, and maneuver around obstacles.
Scaleability -- LEGO Island's game play is automatically customized to the power of any Windows 95 Pentium computer and can take advantage of new technology and faster hardware as it becomes available.
MMX Technology -- Adventures on LEGO Island is compatible with the new Intel MMX technology. Intel's new MMX implementation provides an addition to the main processor chip, which adds parallel processing and dramatically enhances overall computing speed and power. When Adventures on LEGO Island is run on an MMX enabled system, game play is faster, graphics are smoother, and the quality and color of images is significantly enhanced.

# # # LEGO Systems, Inc. is the North American division of the LEGO Group, a privately-held firm based in Billund, Denmark. The division employs over 1,3000 people, most of whom work at it's 203-acre headquaters in Enfield, Connecticut, where it manufactures over 2.7 billion LEGO elements each year. The LEGO Group is committed to the development of children's creative and imaginative abilities, and its employees continue to be guided by the motto adopted in the 1930s by the company founder Ole Kirk Christiansen: "Only the best is good enough."

Mindscape, Inc. is a leading developer and publisher of consumer software for personal computers and video console systems. An industry pioneer with over fifteen years of experience, Mindscape provides award-winning software for the entertainment, education, and reference markets.

Mindscape is headquartered in Novato, CA, with offices in North America, Europe, and Australia. The company's development subsidiaries include Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) of Sunnyvale, CA, and Micrologic of Emeryville, CA. Mindscape is part of Pearson, plc, the international media group based in London which focuses on the information, education, and entertainment markets.

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