Back in 2012, Mojang was working on a game called Brickcraft that would’ve essentially been the Lego-themed Minecraft spin-off we’ve always dreamed of. Unfortunately, the game was canceled largely due to the developer’s frustrations with Lego’s brand restriction, but now there’s a silver lining: the original, in-development version of Brickcraft has been found and preserved, and you can now play it for yourself.
Omniarchive, a community website dedicated to “preserving all official Minecraft content,” released the newly-preserved Brickcraft build this week. “The build dates to the 28th of June 2012,” contributor DEJVOSS says, “around a month before the game’s supposed cancellation (sourced from a Notch’s tweet in July 2012 saying the game got cancelled). Tho I personally believe it may be one of, if not the last build ever.”
Brickcraft was in development for less than a year, and while this build is little more than a prototype it does give us some idea of what might have been. You drop into a procedurally generated world, armed with a handful of Lego brick types that you can place as you please as you wander around in first-person. It very much feels like “Minecraft, but Lego,” though in this form it’s far more limited in scope than Mojang’s venerable sandbox game.
The development of Brickcraft was documented in an official Lego podcast back in 2020 – there’s helpfully a full text transcript of the podcast out there, too – and it sounds like a story of all the right ideas meeting all the wrong lawyers.
Soon after Minecraft started gaining traction, but well before it had become a household name, Mojang approached Lego with the idea for Brickcraft. After some back and forth, Lego greenlit the project and development properly got underway in 2011. But eventually, the independent spirit of Mojang and Lego’s big business brand guidelines started to clash.
“It became a legal mess on our side of the table,” Lego’s Daniel Mathiasen said in that podcast. “It was back to big corporations and small companies not being able to work together. So our legal team emphasized a lot of things that were in the grand scheme of things wouldn’t matter, like looking back and seeing the epic nature of what Minecraft has become and driving force in a kid’s culture in itself, like listing out the hurdles that the LEGO Group put up for this would be ridiculous. Like strategically, they would not matter at all.”
“For instance, like one thing we wanted to do was to add scratches to the pieces, the LEGO pieces,” Mojang’s Daniel Kaplan explained. “And that was something we got a lot of pushback from the LEGO Group, the were like, oh no we can’t show pieces being scratched. And we were like, but all LEGO pieces in every box are scratched. And they had this façade on how they want people to look at them that they were very keen on keeping.”
Eventually, former Mojang boss Markus “Notch” Persson was the one to pull the plug. “I don’t remember all the details,” Kaplan said, “but it was in our office. And I think, Notch just said we’ll end this project now. At the end of the day I think Markus just gets fed up with all the various rules that did not sync with his view and our view of how we want to make games. It was just a very different way of looking at things.”
If it had continued development, Brickcraft would’ve eventually gotten the same sort of vast biomes that Minecraft has, just with classic Lego themes ranging from cities to pirate ships, with the idea “to make an adventure game out of it.” We eventually got a sort of Lego Minecraft in Lego Worlds, though while that game is of decent regard it certainly never took off the way Minecraft itself did.
We’ll never know what might have been if Brickcraft had crossed the finish line, but now at least we can play a little of it for ourselves. And hey, these days we do at least have official Lego Minecraft sets to enjoy, so it’s not as if the crossover is totally lost.
Check out all the best Lego games that actually did see the light of day.
