Lego Star Wars has quite the interesting history
when it comes to the fact that the game entertains children
everywhere. It all stems from the popular plastic building blocks
that can be used to build cars, space ships, buildings, and whatever
a child's imagination can think up. Anyone under the age of 60 has
most likely played with Legos, so that means that many of the
children playing with them today have grandparents who once used
their imaginations to do the same exact thing.
The Lego saga began in 1932 in Billund, Denmark,
where a carpenter by the name of Ole Kirk Kristiansen began a new
business that made wooden toys, stepladders, and ironing boards.
What no one realized at that time was that Legos had been born.
It was in 1934 that Kristiansen created the
name Lego, which is derived from "leg godt," which are the Danish
words for "play well." However, in Latin, the word Lego means "I put
together." Unfortunately in 1942, the plant burned down and
Kristiansen had to rebuild, but just two years later, Kristiansen's
plant purchased an injection molding machine that created plastic
toys, but he was yet to invent the building blocks.
It was in 1949 that the Automatic Binding
Brick was introduced for sale only in Denmark and looked like a tiny
plastic brick with eight or four studs. However, by 1950 the Lego
accounted for half of the company's business. From then on, the Lego
began spreading around the world and through the years had developed
various themes such as sets that focused just on building cars or on
just building buildings. The possibilities were endless.
However, the Legos of today are much different
than the Legos both we and our parents played with. Our children are
playing with Lego theme parks, there are Lego themed movies, and
there are even Lego themed video games that are based off of
particular toy lines created by Lego. One of those toy lines is Lego
Star Wars, which later led to the Lego Star Wars video game.
The video game was first released in 2005 and
is based during the prequel trilogy to the actual Star Wars Trilogy
that began in the late 1970's and early 1980's. However, the game
was actually released a month before the last of the Star Wars films
was released.
It was developed by LucasArts and Eidos
Interactive for the Sony PlayStation2, the Microsoft Xbox, and for
personal computers running the Microsoft Windows Operating System.
It was also developed for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. In August
2005, A Mac port was developed for the game to be played on Mac
computers and in October 2005, a version was released for the
Nintendo GameCube.
Lego Star Wars received the Kidsworld.com
award of Game of the Year and received very good reviews. In May
2005, it even peaked at the top of the charts in the UK to
eventually lose its prominent spot to the Episode III game that was
later released. However, its position as a top game for kids
remained high for quite some time.
In September 2006, Lego Star Wars II: The
Original Trilogy was released and a year later was followed by a
prequel game released in November 2007 called, Lego Star Wars: The
Complete Saga. Some deem the
Lego Star Wars video games as the coolest games in history and
they consistently receive ratings between 4 and 5 stars out of a
possible 5 stars on many gaming websites. The games are great for
children and are a great way for the Lego legacy to live on through
the electronic world.
