The spirit of 80s racing games lives on in Lego 2K Drive

A new collaboration between 2K Games and Lego takes the form of an open-world racing game with buildable, breakable cars

Classic video games never really die. While they're still remembered by designers and producers, their influence lives on and they can crop up in the most unexpected places. 2K Games has announced a new agreement with Lego, which will begin with Lego 2K Drive, an open-world racing game created by veteran studio Visual Concepts. It combines the explorable world and discoverable challenges of Forza Horizon with the fun handling, weapons and power-ups of Mario Kart - but its origins lie in a completely different set of car games.

Executive producer Mark Pierce started his games career at Atari in the late 1980s, working on the company's classic racers RoadBlasters, Road Riot and San Francisco Rush, and was around while another team was crafting the legendary 3D racing sim Hard Drivin'. I was so fortunate because a lot of the original Atari guys were still there," he recalls. David Sheppard, who was the second software engineer hired and Peter Takaichi's group who did all the mechanical design. I knew Jed Margolin, one of the guys who invented force feedback steering. It was incredible, the culture was just so strong, so creative ... A lot of us at Visual Concepts South have a heritage in making arcade racing games. We really wanted to make an arcade-style game that would be easy to learn, but hard to master."