Buckle up, guys! This is a long one. Ninjago's been a part of my LEGO career from the beginning to the end, although I didn't always know it at the time. From my original pitch for NINJA GHOSTS in 2004 to worldbuilding for Ninjago: Dragons Rising in 2021, and all the video game, marketing, and packaging design work in between, I could build a whole portfolio out of my Ninjago work alone.

In 2020, I rediscovered one of my old LEGO Concept pitches from July 2004, packed with year-one Ninjago elements. Dragon ninjas and skeleton soldiers fighting for control of mythical golden weapons. A remote monastery with a wise master working to stop a sorceror and army escaped from the Underworld. A group of unique heroes with elemental powers. And — most revolutionary for 2004-era LEGO — a girl as one of the protagonists. (Needless to say, I had some opinions about the gender balance in the Knights Kingdom line I was working on that year.)

So I spent 2020 making jokes about "What if I invented Ninjago and no one told me?" And they only got funnier when I tracked down the project invoice and saw the title I'd given it.

But even so, I never really took it seriously. The idea that some concept I'd cooked up in 2004 and then forgot about would show up again years later in 2011 seemed too far-fetched. (Although in hindsight, that was the same timeline for my Collectible Minifigures pitch to hit retail shelves, so maybe I should have kept an open mind.)

I spent the next three years deliberately avoiding ever asking the Ninjago team about whether NINJA GHOSTS was the start of Ninjago, because it was always funnier to not have a definitive answer for the fans who kept asking. But then in 2023 I ended up talking with some of the old concept team and they spilled the beans.

And the answer was: sort of. As we remembered the details of the pitch, and resurrected an old dead hard drive for the ancient notes and working files, it turned out I wasn't the first guy on the project, but (as far as we can reconstruct) the second. But it looks like I did get to introduce a bunch of the elements that would become core to the Ninjago story later on.

In 2003, LEGO was near bankruptcy and reeling from Mega Bloks stealing the top construction toy ranking the year before with their fantasy mass army-builder Dragons. An artist named Wong at LEGO's Hong Kong Concept Lab came up with a possible response: Spirit Defenders, a fantasy mass army-builder playtheme about an army of sorcerous ninjas battling a second army of samurai skeletons for control of sacred shrines.

(Normally I'm careful not to include images on this site that I didn't personally work on, but I'm making an exception here for Wong — the "Spirit Defenders" image is an important artifact of Ninjago history that I suspect has been preseved nowhere else in the world outside of my ancient dying hard drive.

It's a long shot, but if anyone has any information about Wong, let me know. We don't know anything other than that she or he was working in LEGO's Hong Kong Concept Lab in 2003.)

LEGO declined to move forward with Spirit Defenders in 2003, but passed the concept on to LEGO's Los Angeles Concept Lab in 2004 to see if one of us could do anything with it. I snapped it up.

Above, you can see my brainstorm sketch from that day, which would later become the NINJA GHOSTS pitch board. We didn't have fancy illustration tablets or even digital cameras back then, so our process was to hit the office, take our assignments, and spend the day making ballpoint-pen sketches. If any were worth coloring up at the end of the day, we'd take the sketches home to scan on the worlds' slowest physical scanners, color them up in Photoshop 6.0, and bring them in the next morning.

Fresh off developing the first year of Knights Kingdom, my immediate concerns were that Spirit Defenders didn't have any characters for kids to identify with, or concrete goals for them to aspire to. I addressed these with a lot of the same beats from Knights: a team of color-coded heroes with themed powers, a flamboyant enemy sorceror with an army of henchmen, and a powerful artifact that everyone was fighting to claim.

"On the night of the lunar eclipse, Rita-Repulsa-like, the Dragon Sorceress escapes from the Underworld with her ninja ghosts to besiege the monastery and seize the Golden Katanas. To stop them, the monastery keeper and his daughter must gather magic scrolls to hang on the iron temple bell before the eclipse ends. Ringing the bell summons the scrolls' elemental samurai spirits: the adaptible green archer of Wood, the immovable gray pikeman of Stone, and the elusive blue horseman of Water."

(I can't say now why I picked those three elements in particular. They're like a random mix-and-match between Bionicle and Battle Beasts.

I also like that Rita Repulsa shoutout, anticipating Ninjago's placement in the Super Sentai tradition. Always with my finger firmly pressed on the pulse of 1993 popular culture.)

Look at that proto-Garmadon! I don't have the notes for this page, and none of us remember anymore what role he played in the pitch, or why he's quadruple the size of all the other characters. I sure was getting maximum use out of that cape-sleeve idea though.

NINJA GHOSTS kept the goodguy skeletons and badguy ninjas from Spirit Defenders, which I knew would be a difficult sell. Rather than doing the smart thing and make the ninjas the heroes instead, I added human characters to make the hero side more relatable: the wise monastery keeper and his daughter, early versions of Wu and Nya, who maintained the monastery and protected the mythical Golden Katanas that would survive as the Golden Weapons of Creation in Ninjago year one.

On the opposite side, the evil ninjas were now led by the underworld Dragon Sorceress, serving as an early Garmadon. Her dragon decorations and allies were a callback to one of my favorite minifigures of the 1990s, the Shogun from LEGO's 1999 Ninja line. In the NINJA GHOSTS backstory, the Sorceress was the Shogun's descendant (another carryover from my Knights experience, where the story manager Resh Somauroo loved to draw familial ties with minifigures of earlier playthemes). The Sorceress was granted her magical powers and turned to evil by a pact with the ancestral dragon from the Shogun's family crest. It may be that Ninjago's elemental dragons and the Great Devourer owe their entire existence to the fact that the Shogun minifigure had a cool shirt and banner graphic a decade earlier.

As I'm going through my Concept Lab archives, I'm finding that NINJA GHOSTS was only one of a much larger packet of concept pitches we sent back to Denmark that week. Most looked more like this: cleaned-up black and white line art rather than full color. Some went on to become full LEGO playthemes, some became Ninjago subthemes, and some are still sitting in the LEGO concept library waiting to inspire future developers.

It's funny to compare early-2000s LEGO material with work from just a couple years later. In 2004, LEGO had reluctantly cracked the door open to action play with Bionicle, but minifigures were still thought of as static dollhouse figures to pose in lifeless dioramas. This scene looks pretty un-action-packed and boring to our modern eyes, but even this was revolutionary for its time.

The LEGO playtheme developers would slowly succumb to BrikWars' inexorable creeping influence over the following decade, and now minifigures are correctly treated as the dynamic action heroes that kids always knew they were.

This INFINITE REALMS concept, seen above, had a different fate. It never got picked up for development in its own right, but in a very LEGO-appropriate way, all of its elements would get busted apart and incorporated into Ninjago and Legends of Chima instead. The dragon-riding swordsman versus flying pirate ships is straight out of Ninjago: Skybound, and you can even see a recognizable Destiny's Bounty in the far distance below them. A Serpentine warrior appears in the foreground with Garmadon's characteristic kabuto helmet and extra arms (and a deadly brick separator for a tail!). A classic Ninjago sky city/temple appears on Chima's floating Mt. Cavora. Cavora's phoenix figures dot the skies, and the other Chima animal figures ride around the Chima Outlands on their Chima Legend Beasts.

In 2015, Ninjago: Possession introduced the "Sixteen Realms" of worlds parallel to Ninjago, which was a numerical downgrade from the INFINITE REALMS posited here, presumably because infinity was out of budget scope. Chima was revealed to be part of the Realm of the Wyldness, which made everything here Ninjago from top to bottom.

And finally 2023 brought Ninjago: Dragons Rising, a show about all the Realms crashing together into a single crossroads dimension, which was the entire premise of the INFINITE REALMS pitch to begin with.

Realistically speaking, this aspect of INFINITE REALMS was completely unworkable in 2004 - you can't introduce this many unrelated concepts into a new product line all at once and expect to get any audience connection. It was only possible in Dragons Rising because Ninjago had had a full decade to give all of its characters, realms, and concepts their own proper introductions first.

Apart from the minor Garmadon-esque bits, though, none of this appeared in the first year of Ninjago. Denmark sent the NINJA GHOSTS concept material back to Hong Kong, but all the other material from that pitch packet stayed behind in Denmark, and it wouldn't have had any influence on the process until later on.

LEGO's medieval / fantasy slot was already claimed by Knights Kingdom from 2004-06, so LEGO kicked the ninja theme back to the Hong Kong studio for further development and a potential 2007 release. But, no luck: the 07-09 shelf ended up going to the more traditional fantasy-era Castle playtheme instead.

By this time, LEGO had been failing and near-bankrupt for several years, and they'd had to shut down the Los Angeles operation after it lost one manager after another to other L.A. toy companies which were (at the time) vastly bigger, more successful, and able to pay much higher salaries. I spent the next couple of years freelancing for other LEGO departments and across the toy and games industries.

By 2009 it was a different story. LEGO was revitalized, thanks on one hand to Jørgen Vig Knudstorp stepping in to force order onto the absolute spaghetti chaos of LEGO logistics and finances, and on the other to newly-profitable playthemes based on popular licenses and original story IP rather than the dry Playmobil-style vignettes of previous decades.

The Spirit Defenders / NINJA GHOSTS material was pulled out of the archives and back into development with Tommy Andreasen's team in Denmark, along with Junya Suzuki flown in from the Hong Kong office. By this time, the ninjas had been recast as the good guys, and their opponents had been briefly replaced with masked oni goblins before returning to armored skeletons again later in development. (The oni and their masks would return in 2018-2019 in the Ninjago Oni Trilogy.)

But the Ninjas weren't coming back as the new Castle line. That retail niche would go to the Kingdoms playtheme instead. After an intense six months of development, Ninjago was reimagined completely as some kind of crazy anything-goes ninja mech / flying pirate ship / magic dragon / skeleton army dieselpunk mashup. It was an order of magnitude removed from anything LEGO had ever done before. What the heck happened?

BrikWars, as it appeared in 2002. I'm pretty sure this single unpaid, unacknowledged image did more to revolutionize LEGO's conception of itself and the Minifigure than all the years of hundred-hour work weeks I put in for the company afterwards.

I wasn't in the Denmark office in 2009; my last visit was the year before, meeting with the LEGO Games team. But the people who were there tell me that there was a lot of BrikWars art floating around the office during those six months.

And it makes sense - BrikWars' influence at LEGO was peaking in 2009. LEGO was shamelessly embracing BrikWars' multi-genre slapstick action-hero "minifig" sensibility across all its channels. BrikWars art was about to appear in the pages of LEGO's seminal Complete Minifigure Guidelines. The LEGO Universe team had just rebooted development with BrikWars as its primary inspiration, and made BrikWars a required part of employee orientation. The LEGO Movie was right around the corner, wearing its BrikWars influence on its sleeve, with the studio going as far as to lift an image directly from the BrikWars rulebook to use in its job recruitment posts.

I made sure to include a "BrikWars material is not owned by LEGO" exclusion clause in every one of my LEGO employment contracts, and I was legally obligated to make objections internally whenever somebody pulled BrikWars material directly, but I was still pretty excited every time I saw it influencing LEGO culture through the 2010s.

Intellectual property runs both ways, of course. When BrikWars was picked up for commercial publication later on, I had to repaint hundreds of illustrations to remove anything that might look too much like it belonged to any specific toy company. The illustrations in this section are historical artifacts from a time when BrikWars was a free fan project. None of them look like this anymore.

Ninjago's unprecedented genre explosion becomes a lot more precedented if you look at it as NINJA GHOSTS plus BrikWars. So who knows? Maybe Ninjago has some BrikWars blood in it as well.

And ninja training buddy comedy? And Tornadoes of Creation? And... ?

I've been seeing people on the internet getting a little dazzled around this part of the page, so I wanted to add a quick note and remember the big picture here. All the elements of Ninjago that made it truly revolutionary (both in the conceptual and physically literal sense) had nothing to do with me. The magic that set Ninjago apart from other run-of-the-mill toys and playthemes of the time happened somewhere with the teams in Hong Kong and Denmark while I was back in the U.S. working on a series of unrelated video game projects for other companies.

It was one thing for me to spend a week pitching a concept, and a whole other marathon of months and years for a design team to turn that concept into a workable product that fits into a market niche, a manufacturing plan, and a retail strategy, especially within the million cogs and wheels of the LEGO corporate behemoth and all the other playthemes competing for the same resources. Nobody understands how complex and interconnected LEGO product development is until they've been in the trenches, and the fact that Tommy Andreasen's team was able to cram it into six months is bonkers.

For some of what that development work looked like, you can check out Brian Andrew Ellis's concepts here.

If you'd asked me a few years ago, I'd have told you my first exposure to Ninjago was right before everyone else's, when we were adding Ninjago content to LEGO Universe in 2010.

Prior to that, though, we built the Ninja-themed world of Forbidden Valley, and for that I dusted off the NINJA GHOSTS pitch that I thought had never gotten picked up for development.

NINJA GHOSTS' skeleton horseman became the poster child for the Forbidden Valley update, and the team pulled architecture, enemies, and props liberally from NINJA GHOSTS to build the new world. Knowing what I know now, Forbidden Valley could be considered the first Ninjago content ever released to the public, although no one knew it at the time.

Generating marketing images like the ones above was a big part of my job on LEGO Universe. It's hard to remember how to credit these now that a decade's gone by, but I generally did the layouts for the key visual posters, with Wooyang Kim or Keith Richards rendering individual 3D elements in Maya, and then back to me for final compositions. In-game screenshots were usually taken either by myself, Brian Miller, or Chris Brubaker, with the rest of the marketing team running around playing background extras as needed.

After Forbidden Valley, I tossed NINJA GHOSTS back into my own archives and forgot about it again for another decade.

A year later, LEGO asked us to add Ninjago for real. But, as was typical for LEGO at the time, they gave us almost no information about it, and what scraps they did share tended to be inaccurate and out of date. Without any storyline or details to speak of, we had to invent the whole in-game Ninjago realm out of a couple monastery screenshots and minifigure sketches, and just hope for the best.

As a result, our Ninjago realm had some differences from what appeared in the TV show. The monastery was a landscape-spanning fortress, the Skulkins knew Spinjitsu, and there were no dragons to speak of.

Our Fire Temple and Earth Gauntlet expansions were planned for 2012, and so we needed more Skulkin-themed enemies. LEGO shut the game down before we could launch them, but we had the Bone Beetle, Bone Vulture, Underhand, and Bone Wolf in beta before the curtain came down.

With only the monastery and its training arena to work with, we dug hard into Spinjitsu-friendly architecture and modular spinning-trap concepts. Originally, in-game Spinjitsu was going to more closely mirror the unstoppable spinning top play of the physical toy, which required more circular and ramp-based construction.

I wish we'd had time to develop out our modular monastery trap gauntlet ideas before LEGO Universe's premature closure at the end of 2011. We had a bunch of ideas for player-customized play arenas that never reached production.

In 2012 I became the art director of illustration for North American markets in LEGO's internal agency. While my early focus was on LEGO Legends of Chima and LEGO Super Heroes, by 2015 my time was increasingly gobbled up by years of more Ninjago work. Trading cards, posters, packaging, comics, ads, events, promotions — you name it.

My first art direction job for Ninjago was to see if we could adapt some of the hacks and cheats we'd spent the previous couple years developing for the LEGO: Legends of Chima art pipeline. Layered stock background elements, standardized color and lighting setups, reusable poses and body parts, quick minifigure palette swaps, smart layers to switch between minifigure decorations; every shortcut we could think of.

The images above are some of the few where I illustrated the characters from scratch (as opposed to modifying existing character art from earlier years), setting up their color and lighting to be dropped into our library of standardized backgrounds. The effect was good enough for character showcase pages on the website and in LEGO Magazine, but ultimately we found it was more effective to just go back to bespoke images for almost all practical uses.

These images are good examples of a common hurdle in illustrating for LEGO over the years, which is that the illustrations very often need to be finalized while the parts are still being designed. We didn't have the bone helmets, swords, or armor pieces yet, but by this time I had a decade of experience making best guesses from preliminary schematics and optimizing the images for emergency corrections later on.

I was subsequently put on packaging duty, and coincidentally enough the theme was another one of my July 2004 concept pitches: SKY PIRATES (later renamed to Ninjago: Skybound). I was really dedicated to flying pirate ships that month, apparently.

Principal design and layout were handled by legendary packaging designer Leanne Pagano. My job here was filling in all the illustrated elements and effects, as well as the red sailcloth background (my own home curtains with color and canvas texture digitally applied).

Each season of Ninjago spotlights a different ninja on the packaging, and Skybound's star was the lightning ninja Jay. In the early versions of the story (and the package spotlight), Jay was injured in a fire, forcing him to wear an eyepatch and making everyone suspect he was in league with the new air pirate antagonists. This storyline was abandoned for a bunch of reasons, not least because LEGO thought that setting Jay on fire on the packaging would cause a bunch of consumer confusion with the fire ninja Kai.

Jay's eyepatch was a payoff for the Grave Danger episode of Ninjago: Possession the previous year, in which Jay was delighted to see a vision of his future self with an eyepatch, a beard, and a girlfriend. Future Eyepatch Jay was released in a 2018 Toys "R" Us exclusive minifigure collection box, so his future injury is canon and his eyeball's days are numbered.

The big collectible for this subtheme were the Djinn Blades, which could capture the souls of the ninjas. The final effects incorporated each ninja's elemental power, the swirling smoke of the Djinn antagonist, and the Spinjitsu spin. As usual, the illustrations needed to be finished before the sword designs were ready, so we built the effects around janky 3D-printed prototypes that we could swap out with final product photos later.

2016's Wu-Cru promotion was the brainchild of the late great Scott Decoteau, allowing fans to join Master Wu's crew and earn achievement badges and ninja promotions by completing missions on the Ninjago website, watching videos, and looking for easter eggs in the show. Art directed by Toby Dutkiewicz, it required a ridiculous amount of content, of which I was responsible for dozens of achievement badges and hundreds of ninja outfit designs and medallions.

It also had me painting up this Wu-Cru launch poster, with some funny restrictions. I had to keep the Wu-Cru armbands hidden on a separate layer while painting it up, because somebody (Scott) decided that knowledge of the existence of the Wu-Cru was too sensitive for our coworkers. He'd gotten the idea from a similar requirement I'd had the year before while doing comics for LEGO Jurassic World, where Universal required that all images of the secret new Indominus Rex had to be covered with fake images of T-Rex during production.

Wu-Cru debuted during the Ninjago: Hands of Time season, which had Kai and Nya as the story focus. In all my years in LEGO Agency, my biggest victory wasn't the moviebuilding or Wu-Cruing, it was teaming up with Leanne to strongarm LEGO into giving Nya the boxcover spotlight.

That was a fight - the conventional wisdom at the time was that retailers wouldn't give you shelf space if you highlighted a girl character on a product for the "boy aisle," and it didn't matter how noble your packaging was if nobody ever got to see it. Our argument was that Ninjago was enough of a cultural and commercial powerhouse in 2017 that we not only had the ability to push back against that status quo, but also the obligation to take a leadership role in doing so.

There was a secondary argument that we should focus on marketing to boys because boys were our primary market, which was a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Did we only market to boys because boys were our market, or were boys our market because we only marketed to boys? Again, Ninjago had established itself enough that it could dictate its own market positioning (even easier to see now with the success of the well-rounded cast of Ninjago: Dragons Rising), and the old reasons for failing to do the right thing were sounding more hollow every year.

It wasn't a total victory; in the end, they only allowed giving Nya the corner spotlight if she shared it with Kai, and — as in my poster image above — the boy character always had to be clearly in front.

Nya finally got her solo box highlight in 2021's Ninjago: Seabound. Too late for those of us who fought to get her there, but I like to think our efforts helped push the needle to make it possible.

In 2016 I was also called in for worldbuilding on The LEGO Ninjago Movie. Which, if you've seen it, looks nothing like the images above! The movie's original time-travel plot and faceless-horde antagonists got axed out completely and used for Hands of Time instead (although some of the material survived in the movie as flashbacks to Lloyd's parents' classic romance).

Worldbuilding on the movie in 2016 worked much the same way as conceptbuilding on NINJA GHOSTS in 2004. I was still sketching up ideas on a notepad while we kicked ideas back and forth across the table, but with a lot more highly-paid people in a much more expensive conference room, and with a much faster version of Photoshop when I went home to color everything up overnight.

After 2017 LEGO laid off most of its US agency and moved everything back to Denmark, and I went back to freelancing and consulting again. Still doing the same kinds of work for the skeleton crew that remained, but now free to work with everyone else between projects.

A lot of my public-facing work was posters for the new LEGO Life magazine, like this two-page splash spread for Ninjago: Master of the Mountain.

In 2020, I ended up right back where I began: back in LEGO's Los Angeles studio, cooking up new ninjas. The Los Angeles office had changed pretty drastically in the meantime, from a tiny no-budget one-room three-person concept satellite in an abandoned factory basement headed up by James Knight in 2004, to a full-fledged Hollywood IP licensing and development house under Keith Malone in 2020.

The original Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitsu had ended in 2019, and LEGO was looking for a spiritual reboot with a new generation of characters that would eventually become 2023's Ninjago: Dragons Rising. I was invited to join a Ninjago worldbuilding summit led by senior concept art manager Christian Damm to start putting the pieces together.

I was still live-sketching concepts through development meetings, the same as in 2004 and 2016, but technology had advanced to where I could do full-color Photoshop rendering on the spot instead of having to take work home overnight. It made a huge difference! The feedback loop was near-instantaneous, with concept discussion and imagery engaging and influencing each other in real time. It was an incredibly satisfying workflow.

With the instant turnarounds, we came up with a tremendous volume of amazing material. So much. You guys have no idea. Ninety percent of it I can't show because there's only so much you can pack into a single TV season; I'm dying to see if more of it gets used in upcoming years (as we've already seen, sometimes this stuff sits in the development hopper for long enough that I forget I had anything to do with it). But I desperately hope more of it comes out eventually, because it was so good.

I'll keep you posted if I spot any of it. Fingers crossed!

Arin was originally a lot more streetwise and slick, with a self-made ninja uniform improvised out of abandoned laundry. The baby dragon Riyu was buildable with some fun play functions; LEGO ultimately went with a single-piece figure instead to make it more playable for the target age group.

We did a bunch of pages of exploration for Arin's new self-taught form of Spinjitsu. Without any of the traditional ninjas around to teach him, we knew his style would be non-standard, but it took some exploration to figure out what that would look like. This eventually turned into his ability to transfer Spinjitsu energy into thrown objects.

Sora was originally a non-human character, showing off the alien variety of the colliding realms. It wasn't clear which kind of non-human she was going to be. Ninjago had several already, and we were about to introduce a bunch more in the mech street race. (Dragon's Rising did indeed introduce a bunch of new non-humans among the racers, but a completely different set from any of the ones we originally planned.)

Sora lost her non-human backstory and became a citizen of the Imperium instead, but she stayed a racer and kept the animal hat. In this early version, it was a kitsune, as a callback to Akita from 2019's Ninjago: Secrets of the Forbidden Spinjitzu.

Sora's logo-heavy bike here isn't just a callback to Akira (obviously). It was also referencing the style of LEGO Exo-Force, LEGO's original mech theme from 2006-2008, back in the days before every LEGO theme was just another mech theme. We'd done a bunch of concept work for Exo-Force at the Los Angeles studio, and I always loved the theme's overblown graphic decorations.

If you thought the sticker graphics were heavy in the released Exo-Force sets, they were absolutely nuts in the concepts. We were going to stuff those boxes with more sticker sheets than instruction pages.

I know what you're thinking. You hate stickers in place of printing. Everybody hates stickers in place of printing. But the opportunity to custom-decorate your own mech was so much fun, I was willing to push for it.

Crossroads City! Just the loosest preliminary thumbnail here. I wish I could show you the architectural concepts we worked up for Crossroads and the Imperium, first because they had some really fun twists, and second because this page is pretty short on architecture. But they were all for storylines that we didn't end up using in season one. I'm still hoping to see some version of them later on.