How Shanethegoat1 Revived Interest In 'Lego City Undercover' With His 'Lego GTA' TikTok Content

LEGO City Undercover is one of the more unique LEGO video games out there. Rather than being based on another popular franchise like Marvel or Star Wars, LEGO City Undercover features an entirely original story about an undercover cop named Chase McCain who returns to Lego City after years of undercover work to take down a criminal mastermind named Rex Fury. Originally released in 2013 to positive reviews, it spawned a sequel on the 3DS and has since been re-released on just about every modern console out there. Lego City Undercover holds a special place in the hearts of LEGO video game fans across the world for its originality, genuinely good comedic writing and gameplay, reminiscent of other LEGO titles but in an open-world setting a-la Grand Theft Auto. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who loves it quite as much as TikTok's Shanethegoat1, though. We connected with Shane over Zoom to get to the bottom of his obsession.

"I probably have around 30,000 hours on every single device combined. I wake up, I play the game, go to sleep, have dreams about the game. Wake up, rinse and repeat every single day of my life," Shane tells us with a taped-up LEGO-man helmet firmly attached to his head.

The first time Shanethegoat1 played Lego City Undercover in 2013, also known as Lego GTA for its similarities to the Grand Theft Auto franchise, he was obsessed. "I was instantly addicted 'cause as a kid, you can't really play GTA. It was like, revolutionary, you could do everything, you could steal a car, you could blow up a car, you could run people over, you could do anything in this game that you could do in GTA, and it's made for kids." This obsession carried with him throughout his life, building up until January 2021 when he created a TikTok account, @shanethegoat1, to let everyone know how much he loved the game.

Shane's videos typically feature him running around in LEGO GTA causing chaos and performing the game's various minigames. Nearly every video begins with his catchphrase, "bitch I'm playing LEGO GTA," followed by him chanting "I just be X" while he wilds out in the game, "X" being whatever he's doing at the time. "My first viral video on TikTok was definitely the Lego gumball," he tells us. In the video, he approaches the game's gumball machine and buys a piece of gum then blows a bubble, saying "I just be blowing" and "I just be sucking" over and over under the caption "Lego gta sus," understanding fully the double-entendre at play. The success of videos like this set the stage for Shane going forward; he found his TikTok niche and would continue to follow it for the months to come, gaining a significant following of over 500,000 TikTok users by March 2022.

Shane tells us about that first viral hit, "It was honestly insane. I was at work and I saw one of my videos blowing up and I was like, 'No way,' because, for around seven months, I had the account before I got my first viral video. I'd had 100,000 views, 200,000, but after seven months it started just blowing up, and in a week I gained like 200,000 followers, which is insane. Before I had around 30,000 and then jumped to 230,0000 in like a week."

"People were saying, 'Is this guy okay? Do we need to call a mental hospital? Is this guy for real?' People were freaking out saying that I'm crazy, but I'm totally fine," Shane tells us. As Shane continued to make videos about LEGO GTA, he continued to lean into the insanity angle, painting himself as someone truly obsessed with the game to the point where it was destroying his life. As his following peaked in January 2022, Shane doubled down on this angle by stepping outside of LEGO GTA into the real world, revealing that he himself had become a LEGO character. "I am a Lego now, I've been to the doctors, the doctors said that it's normal. If you play Lego GTA, you will turn into a Lego, so that is a warning to anyone who plays it like me, you might turn into a Lego."

The IRL videos proved successful for Shane, with three January 6th, 2022 uploads as an IRL LEGO man gaining over a million views. His videos both IRL and in-game continued to hit big throughout the first quarter of 2022. A video of him playing basketball in LEGO GTA gained over 4.9 million views. Another IRL video where he follows a trendy face drawing challenge on TikTok gained over 1.1 million views. "If you do a [certain type of] video for a long time, it will get stale and people will get bored of it. So I decided to hop on the trends, maybe gain some new followings, new fans. I really liked the face drawing trend because that's when people really started to think I was crazy 'cause I was drawing over it all wrong and it was just really fun to do. And once I did it, I saw the traction was going up.

In another video with over 6 million views, he claims to have been playing the game for 19 hours straight, showing his character (with over 7 billion LEGO bits, the in-game currency) swerving around the road as he tiredly talks about hallucinating due to sleep deprivation. Shane quickly became known as the LEGO GTA guy and the virality of the videos started to, at some level, rekindle interest in the game itself.

"If you go on Steam and you go to the reviews, quotes from my videos are on the Steam reviews. There are over 5,000 reviews of just LEGO GTA, saying things like 'I just be blowing,' 'I just be causing havoc,' 'I just be panicked.' All these [quotes] are from my videos, which is insane. I never thought that this would ever happen in my life, but it truly is happening."

In an attempt to expand his reach further, Shane opened up a YouTube channel in January 2022 where he posts lengthier content about LEGO GTA as well as LEGO video games in general. In two months he's managed to bring over 30,000 subscribers to the channel and has uploaded multiple videos with over 100,000 views, the most popular boasting over 450,000. Many TikTokers who try to make the jump to YouTube don't find this level of success, so we asked Shane how he managed it, "I think people just enjoy the content. TikTok's short, like 15-second videos. But when you go over to YouTube, there's around 5-10 minute videos of me playing." One of the more successful examples of this is in his video "I noclipped into the backrooms 😫," a video where his LEGO GTA character ends up in The Backrooms and has to navigate out of them. "I also made the video about my addiction with Lego GTA."

While always sticking with the content that made him a well-known name on TikTok, Shane also knows how to expand his content so the fans don't get sick of him. In February he started posting clips of fan-made LEGO games from YouTubers like Brian Anderson to his page where he records the screen from his phone as if actually playing the game. These videos include games like LEGO Red Dead Redemption and LEGO Breaking Bad, games that obviously don't exist but managed to trick the people over at Game Rant and Brick Fanatics, whose articles on the videos seem to think Shane created these games as prototypes.

Shane reacted to the articles, saying, "I actually was on Google and I looked up my name and I saw that this website said that I made Lego Breaking Bad and Lego Red Dead Redemption, but that is not me. I wanna give full credit to the real creator. That was just a joke video that I made. It's pretty crazy that they credited me." We also asked Shane what his dream LEGO game would be. He told us, "I've always dreamed of them making a Lego World War Game, like a Call of Duty style Lego game that's online, first-person, I just think it would be a really cool style. But I know Lego isn't really oriented to older people, so I don't know if they'd ever make a game like that."

Despite how it may seem, Shane and his content are about more than just LEGO City Undercover. Recently he's been trying to branch out even further on Twitch and TikTok, posting videos where he plays some of his other favorite LEGO games and video games in general. "Some other Lego games I like are LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga […] LEGO Marvel Super Heroes. That was pretty fun. It's kind of like LEGO GTA, you can blow up things and steal cars, but you could also fly in that game, which is pretty cool." He's also eagerly waiting for the newest LEGO Star Wars entry, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. "I'm gonna put millions of hours into that," Shane tells us.

Shane's also made a foray into music with a song called "Skinwalker Forest." The song is written and recorded in the style of meme-rapper Sematary, known for his very distinct style of rap that mixes witch-house with rap for a truly unique sound. Shane told us about the song, "One time I saw this comment on TikTok that was like, 'Shane, when are you gonna make a Sematary type song?' So I found the beat on YouTube, pulled out my mic and [the final cut] is like the second take, all freestyle. I freestyled that whole song. I might make some more music. It was kind of a joke thing, but people seem to like it. So I might be making some more music in the future."

Without showing his face, Shane has built a dedicated following for himself and helped revive interest in a nearly decade-old game thanks to his unique sense of comedy, varied video content and dedication to what he knows: LEGO GTA. While he realizes that his videos aren't for everyone, Shane is more than happy with his effect on the internet and wants nothing more than to keep spreading laughs to his followers and his friends and family. "My friends and family, they honestly just love my videos, my mom and dad love my videos, they've helped me with some of them before, they like being a part of it. It's just really fun 'cause we all get to have a good laugh[…] I've actually had some of my friends message me, they're like, 'Wait, is this you?' Some people recognize my voice so they could know it's me, but people on the internet, they don't know, and I don't think they ever will. I don't really plan on doing a face reveal yet."

At the end of our call, we asked Shane what his final takeaway is from becoming a TikTok meme, revealing the impact his videos have had on people not only on TikTok but in real life, saying, "I love when people comment saying that they will be walking around the house and they'll just start quoting [my] LEGO GTA videos. I find that just so awesome that we could all just come together and find one thing funny. 'Cause a lot of people don't find it funny, but the people that do are amazing because we can all just have a good time during this crazy time that we're in right now where we can just all laugh. I love it."

You can follow Shane on TikTok at @shanethegoat1, YouTube at ShaneTheGoat1 and on Twitch at ShaneIsTheGoat1.