Of all the parts and pieces working together in the many Toys To Life games, the simple NFC tag is the most important. Every Toys To Life game depends on these tags to deliver information from the collectible figures to the game’s console. It’s how the many Toys come To Life on the digital playground of whatever game you are playing. The NFC tags are responsible for holding onto the game data of the figure/vehicle/gadget that you’re playing as, and can also serve the occasional secondary purpose, like powering up low-watt LEDs to illuminate parts of a figure. Without the simple NFC tag, the Toys To Life genre would be very different.

The NFC toy tags for LEGO Dimensions helped set them apart from most of the other Toys To Life games by being removable, interchangeable, and writable. This feature allowed players to use the toy tags from three of your random packs to save three versions of a certain vehicle.

Like most products, the original concept or design of the Dimensions Toy Tags are very different from what we ended up playing with. We will take a quick journey through the phases of Toy Tag design, from where the Dimensions portal all started, to the tiny blue and yellow discs you have sitting around your console today.

The Original Concept

In a tweet from March of 2016, Mark Warburton revealed to the fans a close up look at the original design for the LEGO Dimensions portal. The concept was a simple 3×3 grid similar to a Tic Tac Toe board. The portal allowed you to host up to 9 different figures or vehicles, and didn’t feature any of the LED lit baseplates that factor into most of the Keystone puzzles.

The early prototyped toy tags for the figures were far from the finished product we ended up with. The bases were essentially a beefed up version of the standard 1×4 base plate minifigure stand featured in the LEGO figure blind bags. Though much thicker than the basic design, looking closely at the plate in the image below, it appears nothing more than the figure stand and a simple chip attached to the bottom.

The Original Pitch

The portal evolved from the nine slot base shown above into the base that now sits in most of our living rooms, with a center circle dock and two L shaped pads that could hold up to six tags at once. With the final design of the portal finally selected, the team moved into designing and developing many different types of Toy Tags that would interact with the base in many various ways.

A main feature of the early Toy Tags was the ability to solve puzzles in the game using mechanics built directly into the base. A mechanic eventually replaced by the Keystone portal based puzzles, players could use the toy tags directly to influence characters. Players had the ability to twist the base to different positions, shake the toy tag, push physical buttons built into the minikit or even prompt the tag to glow different colors with internal LEDs to solve puzzles.

The prototyped toy tag bases for figures started off much slimmer, with different profiles. The tags were printed with basic white designs but still featured the LEGO base plate feature allowing you to remove the character’s minifigure for other play.

Eventually a more final and universal toy tag design was settled on closely resembling the tags we all know and love. The final prototype can be seen here in an image with Wyldstyle and her ultimately abandoned Beast Companion (you can even see the rapid prototype 3D printed rough textured lines).

The Final Product

The team ultimately settled on a simple clear blue rewritable toy tag with multiple functionality. The core characters included in each pack were accompanied by a unique design printed directly on the tag, while the minikit builds of vehicles or gadgets were left blank, allowing players to reuse the tag in any way they wanted without being tied to a specific design or use.

What we have today sitting in all our gaming areas is the result of long hours and lots of work put together by the hard working members of TT Games. The ingenuity and creativity the team displayed in developing this game and its interaction with NFC tags really helped set it apart from the rest of the Toys To Life genre competitors.

The out of the box thinking that we saw them use in the development ultimately didn’t translate into the finished product exactly but it’s clear that it influenced the gameplay significantly.

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