Making Minecraft Hot Wheels!

In news so burning hot it'll melt through the tarmac if we delay sharing it a second longer, we've teamed up with Mattel for a new range of Minecraft Hot Wheels cars! So Minecraft fans, better start your engines! Wait, do people have engines? Probably? Yeah? Biology teachers, send your hate mail to the usual address.

Everyone else, check out these awesome new Hot Wheels motors, which transform Minecraft's monsters into fierce auto-mobiles. But how did they do it? Marsh sat down with Bryan Benedict, designer for Mattel, to find out! Marsh didn't ask Bryan if people have engines though, because Marsh is the brains of this operation.

Marsh: could you tell me a little bit about how you came to work at Mattel and Hot Wheels?

Bryan Benedict: I spent ten years in the car industry designing real cars before coming to Mattel. I studied automotive design at ArtCenter and after ten years in the industry, Mattel actually reached out to me out of the blue and asked if I would be interested in joining the team here. It sounded like an exciting opportunity and I haven’t regretted a moment of it since. It’s been a blast!

M: A lot of them made me laugh out loud. Particularly I liked the Enderman as this shady-looking limo!

B: (Laughs) So when I designed those it's about fully immersing myself in that character and really understanding who that character is.

It’s really about “What’s the personality of that character and what kind of vehicle type makes sense for that character? What little details can I add that really play into the story of that character?”

And so the Enderman kind of wanders around aimlessly right? So it’s sort of like a lowrider vehicle that you would expect to be wandering around, just kind of cruising around... and then of course it’s got the block exposed in the trunk, with the trunk half open so you can see the block hidden in there, [because] it’s always carrying a block around.

B: Then [I was] just trying to capture sort of the bulkiness of the character. The large brow, just in the way I capture that, was kind of inspired by a 50’s era truck because they had that larger, taller cab - but squaring it off, obviously, for the world of Minecraft.

I don’t know if you noticed but every single character has the drop icon on the chassis of the car – so whatever that character drops when you kill 'em, is represented on the chassis and we actually did that in full colour. We really felt like it was worth having that nice little surprise feature on the bottom.

And in the case of Iron Golem and Creeper, there’s a secondary drop element represented in the bed – so the Iron Golem has the Iron Ingot in the bed and the Tulip on the chassis and the Creeper has the Gunpowder in the bed and the Disc on the chassis.

M: What about the skeleton and the spider?

B: So the Skeleton, I figure he’s fast and nimble and kind of comes right up on you, and he’s really spindly. I thought it’d be perfect to make him a race car, like an open-wheeled race car, because that enabled me to create a really spindly shape and also a very fast vehicle.

Then the Spider car actually complements that because it is a Holler Truck and that truck actually opens up to then place the Skeleton on top so then you have a Spider Jockey.

So the two work very well together, and it’s another feature within the line where you can play out some of the story in the vehicles. So that Spider-Truck is basically a three-block shape, much like the Spider himself, where the cab represents the head and then there’s that thorax where we call the mid-section which is a little extended cab thing. And then the bed in the back and the box on the back which actually splits and opens up to create a bed, or a platform to place your Skeleton car on.