LEGO Racers Remastered (25th Anniversary)

Today is a very special day. 25 Years ago an amazing game called LEGO Racers came out. It had such an impact on me as a child. When I learned that the 25th anniversary was coming up, I just had to make something special for it. So here is LEGO Racers with a modern look.

I started of by thinking about which track should be remastered. I considered a few but I came to the conclusion that the first track you start on makes the most sense. I replayed the track a couple times to see what could be improved. It was also a good excuse to play the game some more. It's funny how the mind fills in certain blanks. I honestly thought there were skeletons in the minecarts. I probably imagined that as a child. It surprised me that Robin Hood is actually a really quick NPC. So it had to be implemented as well. I took a good look at what path Captain Redbeard took and replicated that in this video.

It was important to me that the game still has the original feel visually. So I did not replace any textures or modify the terrain. But only added stuff to make it look more modern. I did however rebuild all of the buildings as well as I could. It was quite surprising to see that buildings are roughly 3 times the size as the racers. That's been replicated as well. The crane with the box never made much sense to me as a child. If you hit it, your car will start to spin for no apparent reason. So I changed that so that there is a barrel that's leaking oil.

All of the textures are the original ones from the game. The wooden floor texture is also the original one, but I added water puddles to it which makes sense since we are near the docks. There is also a waterfall section that also needs these wet floor textures. This added so much more detail to a relatively empty scene. I also learned while making this, that the cave section has little 2x2 red bricks scattered around. I never noticed this while playing, so I added in a couple more so it's more apparent. I also filled the minecarts with gold, which were originally empty. The original games featured one ship near the exit of the cave. I added an extra one and a Pirate ship in the distance to fill the horizon a bit.

Just like the Racers with Stunt Rally perspective video, it was very tricky to keep track of all the powerups of the opponents. So I'm very lucky that the other NPCs fall behind quickly, just like the original game. Also doing the sound design for this video took a lot of work. When you create a video like this, you realise how much SFXs are actually required to make it feel good. I admire how the developers were able to fit so much content on a small disc. Ohh! And the characters now have the correct voices, which wasn't the case in the game for some reason. 😋

So it was a ton of work but I hope it'll be a nice celebration for an amazing game that gave us so much joy!

Thank you to ‪@ZANTHERA‬ for providing the high quality music.

Set featured in the video:
6286 - Skull's Eye Schooner
6291 - Spaniard Ship

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Welcome to Studframe Animations! I create fun LEGO animations. Mostly about older games.😁

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