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"Your efforts have been outstanding! You've collected enough Energy Crystals to get the Rock Raiders team back home. You're amazing! Mission complete."
―Chief, after the final mission, Rocky Horror.

Chief is a character from the Rock Raiders theme. He is exclusive to one set.

Description[]

The Chief only appears in one set in the Rock Raiders series. He has old grey legs and torso with a printed shirt which has a Power Box with power lines connected to one of his arms, which is turquoise in color, but the right arm being only grey with a yellow hand. His face is masculine with a grey mustache and eyebrows. Additionally added is a pilot helmet accessory with a neon-green visor.

In the video game, there are several differences in Chief's appearance. The helmet with the green visor is chrome in color, and the shirt printings have been slightly altered, including the Power Box. In addition, the pants have a belt printed on the waist, and silver and orange pants markings with black and yellow caution lines appear on the front of the legs.

Background[]

The Chief commands the exploration ship, the L.M.S. Explorer. His left robotic arm, teal green in color, houses a deadly plasma cannon and he's a well-experienced miner as well as the team leader. The book High Adventure Deep Underground says he lost his real arm in an accident rescuing 37 trapped miners from a cave-in on Pluto. He appears in the Rock Raiders games, where he gives mission briefings.

Development[]

Chief was designed by an artist working on the video game, and was intended to be packaged with copies of it, though this idea was dropped:

LEGO.com-icon-yellow This is a description taken from Simeon Hankins. Please do not modify it.

1) Do you recall any scrapped content made for Rock Raiders?

1. I remember an ice creature going through different design stages, not sure if that made it into the final version of the game, I seem to remember a prototype figure although that could have been a rock monster in different plastic colour. I originally designed the chief/captain to have a silver robot arm, I was tired with all the negative stereotypes of disabled characters at the time, you know, all the bad guys had scars or hooks for hands and I wanted him to have a missing arm and still be successful and a good guy. Anyway, Lego couldn’t do arms in silver at the time, as they were manufactured in a different plastic and too brittle to snap into the arm socket, so we went with turquoise.

2) Do you still have images of the prototype Chief figure?

2. I have the physical mini-figure of the chief and can send you some shots of him if you like, he looks just like the in-game model version. The released mini-figure has a re-designed body print and no leg decals. I think they originally wanted to ship each game unit including a chief mini-figure but that idea got dropped at some point.

3) Do you still have development resources? If so are you open with sharing them with me?

3. Sadly no, I have had a look but can’t find anything going back that far.

4) Which kind of work did you do at Artworld?

4. I was a 3D artist, on Rock raiders specifically I mostly did modelling and textures, both in-game and for the cut scenes, all the in-game wall/rock textures are mine for example. Also, during pre-production I did some designs for various game elements. Generally I had a hand in all aspects of artwork and animation, I headed the work on the Lego comic for a while also.

5) For how long did you work on Rock Raiders? Can you recall any significant changes?

5. I can’t remember how long the project lasted, maybe a year or more. I was at Artworld before and for a while after Rockraiders finished. Any changes I can recall are mentioned above. Lego did seem more interested in the cut scenes than the game itself, the reason apparently was that they wanted the animated cut scenes for advertising, back then (and perhaps still) ad standards wouldn’t allow toys to be shown doing things the toy couldn’t realistically do, ie. The mini-figs would need to be seen moved by hand or just static. So linking a toy range to a game conveniently allowed them to show footage from the animated action sequences, avoiding the restrictions placed on the toys. This may not be the whole reason for Lego branching into games but I’m sure it played an important part.

Yeah, I worked on the FMV for Racers, Island, Chess and Knight's Kingdom, although not sure that was a game, maybe just FMV bundled with a Lego set.


Appearances[]

Video Game Appearance[]

Gallery[]

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