There was a demo reel of that too, though I never had a copy. The thing I worked on was much later - around 1998, IIRC. I remember him showing me that video - that was from an earlier aborted concept. I knew Wes! Nice guy! He was like the gatekeeper on all things LEGO Island, so I spent a while with him trying to understand what he was trying to achieve with the first game, and trying to get some of that in the second. I suspect the reality is they ran out of time and slashed content to get the game into releasable state. Also, no speech was recorded on my watch - tbh, it's not the sort of thing you'd do early best to leave it until later when it's clearer what the game will contain. I don't think the cut content relates to the old game - I imagine Silicon Dreams would've dumped everything that Krisalis had done and started again far easier than picking through other people's code. But it feels like the game I worked on - or certainly, the game I intended it to be. I'll be honest, I haven't played the finished game that much - just tonked around the first couple of areas.
After I left, LEGO took the game away from Krisalis and gave it to Silicon Dreams, plus they expanded the platform range - when I was involved, it was intended just for PC and PS1. Unfortunately, that's where my involvement ended - basically with the game still at prototype stage. So we change the kid to Pepper, dropped the dog, added a skateboard (there was going to be a Tony Hawks lite element to the game, performing stunts and so on - don't think that was in the final game), changed the plot to pretty much what it is now, dropped all the time-travelling puzzle solving and added mini-games - basically made it a lot simpler. Someone obviously saw the resemblance between the boy and Pepper, as that's when the idea of using the work as the basis of LEGO Island 2 was suggested.
Before we could really start fleshing stuff out the project was canned when it became clear the TV show wasn't going anywhere. I worked with a company called Krisalis in Rotherham, UK, to generate the prototype - after about 6 months all we had was the younger boy running around a test environment with the dog, and you could tell it to dig in certain areas. So if you saw a river you needed to cross in the City, if you travelled back to the Castle era you might see a tree that you could cut down - this would then form a wooden bridge in the future. There was also going to be a time element (inspired by Day of the Tentacle and, yes, Zelda) - the different themes were set in different eras, so Castle theme predated City theme, and Space theme was in the future, etc. By finding the lost fragments and piecing them back together, you could rebuild the smashed items and then use them to get further in the game. He'd ripped up the pages, causing vehicles and buildings to deconstruct. If you spotted a suspicious bit of ground you could tell it to dig and maybe discover a secret, tell it to attack baddies, sniff out hidden characters/items, that sort of thing.Ī lot of the game centred around finding torn pages from the Great Book Of Building, that the Brickster had stolen after his escape. You also had indirect control over the dog, which would follow your hero. You could only control one character at a time but was able to swap between them, and each had different abilities that you had to use at the right time and in the right combination to solve the action puzzles you encountered. The original design was a sort of Mario 64 / Zelda-esque 3D adventure, with the characters viewed in third-person. They had wristwatch-like devices that they could use to warp into LEGO world, whereupon the kids would stay human but the dog would turn LEGO-y. The dog was a lanky labrador-like comedy hound, always getting scared and whimpering. IIRC, the characters were a blond-haired teenage boy, a black teenage girl and a younger teen red-haired boy (complete with back-to-front baseball cap - I said it was pretty generic stuff!). As I say on the website, the original brief was for a game linked to the TV show about three children and their dog who could enter LEGO world.