The campaign has a branching structure, laid out as caverns in the strata descending from the planet’s surface to its core. Catapulted over to a neighbouring galaxy and running low on resources, they have no choice but to descend to the nearest planet and start digging for the energy crystals they need to power their way home.

The Rock Raiders are a happy-go-lucky mining crew whose ship accidentally stumbles into an asteroid field - causing them terrible, terrible damage and sending them spinning into a wormhole. LEGO Rock Raiders is one of those mythical real-time strategy games that is not primarily about bashing other people. So let’s take a step back in time, to before “Lego Game” was a whole genre of licensed tie-ins, to the heady days of 1999… LEGO Rock Raiders Why is this relevant? Because after I rebuilt my Windows XP machine with true 2004-era components, I got Rock Raiders running.

(I guess it should really be “Rao Bao Dao Zao”, but Bao somehow never entered into the equation.)

Finally, if you slur “The Rober Dozer” really hard you end up with… Rao Dao Zao. For some reason, my mind saw fit to repeat this voice clip over and over and eventually swap “Load” for “Robe” to form “The Rober Dozer”. In Rock Raiders, when you hover the mouse over things, the name of the thing is read out, and one of the vehicles is “The Loader Dozer”. Previously, when playing Baldur’s Gate, I’d made my real name “Robbie” marginally more fantastical by shortening it to “Robe” (shush, I was only 11 or 12). LEGO Rock Raiders was a formative game for me - it’s the reason why I’m called Rao Dao Zao.

Lego rock raiders game sounds