48 ms·

Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)

• DocTomoe 5y ago
  I think traditional Lego died when they introduced the parts separator tool - back in my day, you destroyed your fingernails (and sometimes even used your teeth) separating parts. Attaching two 2x1 thin bricks was considered horrific, because you knew you'd never be able to separate them anymore. Kids these days have it too easy.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Pro tip: push a brick at a 45 degree angle between the two stuck plates, instant separation.
• clean_send 5y ago
  Another good way to get lots of random pieces cheap is go to eBay and look for bulk lots. Most people sell by the pound and ultimately it’s just your imagination holding you back!
• bil7 5y ago
  title correction: 9 ways lego has researched and expanded it's product line to increase profits while continuing to sell less popular traditional products
  • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    Yes, it is so much fun to tell stories with cherry picking.
  • mcv 5y ago
    Largest toy manufacturer in the world. Can't really argue with that. I do miss the old, simpler lego from the early 1980s, but those things still exist in the Classic and Creator lines. Buy them. I love Lego Star Wars, but Classic and Creator are the soul of Lego.
    • oaiey 5y ago
      And leaders in plastic piece production ... and interestingly also long-time IT experts.
• Freak_NL 5y ago
  That dark pattern where a website gives you the next article it thinks you should read does not work well here on this older article. Below the Lego article I get “Hate math? Then don't help your kid with their homework” — which it proceeds to load hundreds of times (a search for the word 'homework' yields over 1000 hits now) below each iteration just because I tried to scroll to the bottom. Somehow its recommendation engine ended up recommending the same article, recursing endlessly. Stupid me, why would I expect to be able to just scroll to the bottom of the article for the website's footer?
  • kwhitefoot 5y ago
    Are your surfing without protection? Scrolling to the bottom for me works perfectly. I tried disabling uBlock, then I got the behaviour you mentioned. I always have uBlock on to disable scripts and fonts. Quite a lot of sites work perfectly well that way and I enable the minimum scripts and fonts for those that don't.
    • toyg 5y ago
      A website optimizing itself for freeloaders rather than ad-watching users, seems... counterproductive for their bottom line.
      • alexb_ 5y ago
        Almost every single website, especially anything involving articles, is completely unusable without an adblocker. I don't know how those who don't use adblockers do it...
    • dotancohen 5y ago
      I'm using uBlock Origin in Firefox, and I also got the infinite scroll on Math Homework article loop.
      • Freak_NL 5y ago
        Yeah, I got what I posted above with uBlock Origin on, in Firefox.
• k__ 5y ago
  I was a kid in the 90s and most of the things written in that article were already true. I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box, and built my own things later.
  • bluetomcat 5y ago
    A more interesting comparison would be to put the core themes of the 1990s (Castle, Pirates, Space, Town) against the modern popular themes (Ninjago, Creator, Star Wars, City). The old sets had less specialised parts and less colour variety, which allowed kids to combine sets from the same theme easily. The buildings (castles, fortresses, harbours) almost always had a big baseplate (flat or 3D). Minifigs were themed and textured, but weren't cartoonish with facial expressions. Nowadays, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with Creator-style builds. You can probably build a new vehicle out of the same set, but combining different sets from the same theme is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings rarely have baseplates and feel very airy and unharmonic.
    • where-group-by 5y ago
      The number of specialised parts is one thing I dislike about modern Lego sets. They do look great and have really smart building techniques, but I just want to build a brick house with my kids. There is always Lego classic sets, and smaller creator houses do have a lot of regular bricks too. But it is a bit annoying once you amass a few sets from other lines. Still, I'm glad they are in business. I will take whatever they do now Vs them going bust, which was a risk a decade or so ago (or maybe longer, I can't remember the details).
      • mcv 5y ago
        My brother and I got the first two grey castles in the 1980s (the first castle yellow; grey was a fairly new colour back then). Those castles mainly relied on fairly large castle wall pieces. At first, even as a kid, I felt that was cheating; we should have gotten bricks to assemble all those walls. Later I discovered what a boon they were, because they allowed me to rapidly design new and different castles. Sure, I couldn't build a spaceship out of them, but just exploring the space of all the possible castles you could build was amazing. Some of these specialised pieces inspire creativity. Especially with spaceships. But I do agree that many modern sets just invite you to build this one thing out of them. We did actually turn out Millennium Falcon into an X-Wing and a TIE-fighter once, but we did eventually turn them back into the Falcon. It feels more wrong than it used to to build something else.
• samwillis 5y ago
  I would love to know what percentage of Legos revenue is now from adults buying the incredible large, complex and expensive sets to build themselves. Lego is so associated as a toy for children just as computer games are, but gaming is a larger industry for adults than children. My wife and I now regularly buy these large lego sets for each other (birthdays, Christmas and anniversaries) and do them together in the evenings after the kids are in bed. Its such a lovely way to relax.
  • mcv 5y ago
    I think 1980s kids who grew up and got well-paying tech jobs are their largest customer demographic now. Kids play Minecraft instead. That's what my oldest son said, at least; he doesn't see the point in Lego now that Minecraft exists. Breaks my heart. I mean, Minecraft is fantastic, but it's not Lego.
    • watwut 5y ago
      Overwhelming majority (but not all) of kids I know have parents that limit how much they can play on computer or tablet. They play with legos regularly (among other things).
    • BrS96bVxXBLzf5B 5y ago
      An alternative viewpoint: Minecraft is Lego, and Lego isn't. When there were fewer themed Lego sets, Lego was a sandbox. You had a mish-mash of generic pieces and your creativity. Modern Lego sets are extremely tailored, both in theme and with sets having bespoke pieces - even if you throw all of your newer sets together in a pile (which people tend not to because each is supposed to be a thing), the pieces aren't as modular, allow for less extension of your imagination. Minecraft is blocks and what you do with them. Minecraft isn't a digital extension of Lego, it's serving the experience Lego did a few decades ago but no longer does.
      • dhosek 5y ago
        There are a lot fewer bespoke parts than you might think. Creating new molds is expensive and if you look closer you'll see that odd shapes are reused for different purposes in different sets.
• insickness 5y ago
  > Lego has become more gender stratified In this day and age, I would be surprised if the Lego Friends line, which was created with girls in mind, were marketed explicitly to girls. My guess is that the girls stratify themselves by what type of toys they are attracted to. There's evidence that the preference is biological: Male monkeys prefer boys' toys https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-toys/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
  • scotty79 5y ago
    I think the point is capitalism gives people what they crave. Not necessarily what they need. But any alternative is unimaginable in individualized minds of modern people.
    • toyg 5y ago
      Oh, it does give them what they need, plus loads of other needs they didn't even know they had - and sometimes these other needs take priority regardless of whether that should be the case. I.e. they will sell you milk, which you likely need, but also all possible types of cheese and yogurt and cream, which you really don't but might actually end up consuming more than milk.
      • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
        Cheese and yoghurt may be healthier than milk, because bacteria already processed the lactose in the milk.
    • iqanq 5y ago
      • bregma 5y ago
        Perhaps the reinforcement of arbitrary culture-specific gender stereotypes is not the point of all toys? There are plenty of other ways parents impose programming.
• shimonabi 5y ago
  Are resin 3D printers any better than FDM in printing Lego bricks? I hope they get good enough so that every kid can make all the pieces. It's a shame that a new 8880 kit costs an arm and a leg.
  • mcv 5y ago
    A friend prints lego rail tracks that don't exist but should. For regular bricks, however, Lego's manufacturing process is incredibly precise in a way that I don't think 3D printing will ever be.
  • hughrr 5y ago
    It’d cost more money and time to print inferior parts.
  • lnsru 5y ago
    There is no problem buying the parts separately needed to build such model. Of course, some exotic parts were discontinued. Lego provides instruction as pdf on their website. Edit: the other brick manufacturers have problems replicating brick quality with injection molding machines. I assembled thousands Lego parts with my son and their fit was exactly the same - perfect. The Chinese kits have one in hundred parts that doesn’t fit well. However it was one in ten some years ago, Chinese learn fast. I doubt one can 3D print anything as Lego replacement.
    • Xylakant 5y ago
      Competitor brick quality is on par or better than Lego at least for some. You need to do a little research on which competitors use which brick producer, but for example the bricks I’ve had in the Mould King sets were absolutely indistinguishable from Lego bricks in quality.
      • lnsru 5y ago
        Building Mould King right now. The difference is almost gone. Cada is worse than Mould King. Anyway with 5x price difference I can live with a bit lower quality. Lego pricing is just sick. Even used sets from not that distant past.
• chillingeffect 5y ago
  What about: 1. Massive online community 2. Virtual simulators 3. Part numbers and 2nd hand retail 4. Computer and phone interfaces 5. Patent expired so more community
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Their patent was bogus anyway.
  • DocTomoe 5y ago
    > 5. Patent expired so more community This should probably read "competition". Some of the stuff secondary brands offer puts shame to Lego, both in creativity as well as in pricing. Bluebrix and Xingbao both have models that are a lot more playable than anything Lego has ever offered.
• mcv 5y ago
  > Now you don’t have regular Lego cops and robbers—you have Batman and the Gotham criminals. You also still have regular Lego cops and robbers. Cops and robbers is still by far the largest sub-theme of the City theme. Almost every set, even some sets that aren't about cops and robbers at all, will have a cop and a robber in there.
  • wmeredith 5y ago
    That was a particularly weird gripe, considering some of the themes that have in fact been replaced by licensed stuff (looking at you LEGO Space/Star Wars) but the cops and robbers is definitely not one of them. The LEGO City theme has always been packed with cops and robbers and still is to this day.
    • mcv 5y ago
      While Lego Space may have been replaced by Lego Star Wars, Space has also come back as a sub-theme of City, but now much more realistic, with bulky space suits and realistic space shuttles. I love it.
• foreigner 5y ago
  My friends and I used to build Lego spaceships and then "battle" by physically smashing them in to each other. Fond memories.
  • automatic6131 5y ago
    My brother (1 year my junior) and I did exactly this!
    • PebblesRox 5y ago
      We prefered a knock-off brand for special-effects for our home videos because the pieces came apart more easily.
• tzmudzin 5y ago
  One other change: the gradual introduction of weapons and violence-related styling. Back in the 80s some "minifigs" may have had sad faces, but never angry/violent ones. That changed a lot over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_LEGO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_LEGO
• jstanley 5y ago
  Is it just me or does the letter from 1974 look like it was typeset in Microsoft Word?
  • unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    It does. And this is going to be my only comment on this topic because I'm too traumatised by people pluralising "lego" with an S.
• altacc 5y ago
  Most of the now & then examples are both true now. The classic sets still exist and how children play with Lego depends on their personality and what they have available (and how it is stored). Children are individuals and Lego allows a larger variety of play than most other toys on the market. My kids have a mix of classic & branded sets and the play area is a mix of designed builds and improvised creations. The favourite and larger sets stay in their own bags when deconstructed but most others are added to the common boxes, which are sorted by rough shape based on what we’ve seen stimulates free building. There are a lot of complex shapes but many of those are useful in free building. I’ve purposely bought some sets with multiple complex flats & bricks as they allow more creativity than just the basic bricks. But I know other children who just like to follow build instructions or just like to play with the characters and that’s OK. That’s the flexibility of modern Lego.
  • watwut 5y ago
    > The classic sets still exist and how children play with Lego depends on their personality and what they have available (and how it is stored). Children are individuals and Lego allows a larger variety of play than most other toys on the market. Yes. And also, many if not most kids combine approaches. Start by building based on manual, then they play with it and it gets gradually destroyed, then just use it is as material. Have few favorite sets they keep, the rest gets destroyed and used as bricks when in mood.
  • thorin 5y ago
    I'm pleased you said that, because we also have a mixture, but most of the sets that were built were broken up and are now in communal boxes. This seems pretty unusual compared to most parents, I guess it's mostly because the parents don't want things to get mixed up. In theory we could rebuild according to the instructions, but in reality it's never going to happen as it would take so long to find all the pieces. Almost every day my kids (Boy 6, Girl, 8) do free play with the mixed lego, sometimes for hours. I'm really pleased with it, as it makes a good break from Youtube etc.
    • patwolf 5y ago
• tommica 5y ago
  Some of the items here read less like lego changing, and instead as the person growing from a child to a parent, and their point-of-view changing (#2 and #3). Also the "now" in #5 does not even mention the modern advertising in it. All in all, this article from 2014 seems have not other reason to exist but to attract hate-clicks.
• ilikerashers 5y ago
  Trying to buy lego for kids these days is a nightmare. I went looking for a spaceship lego set. Just a simple rocket or something. Instead it's heaps of adult themed/Star Wars/NASA licensed stuff. The alternative seems to be a bucket of standard bricks. The adult orientation of LEGO these days makes me hesitant to buy it. I don't mind Adults having LEGO sets, I do mind if that becomes so lucrative it stops kids being able to enjoy it.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • mmustapic 5y ago
    A simple spaceship https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/space-shuttle-adventure-31117 https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/space-shuttle-adventure-3...
    • ilikerashers 5y ago
      You have to sift through pages to find this one and it is 50 euro for a small set.
      • onychomys 5y ago
        In my head, Euros are worth basically the same, maybe a little bit more, than USD. But the US version of that set is only $40 (although it's sold out, so maybe the EU version is higher in price due to scarcity). https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/space-shuttle-adventure-31117 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/space-shuttle-adventure-3...
        • em-bee 5y ago
          EU has about 20% VAT, but even taking that into account it's still more expensive
      • crooked-v 5y ago
        There's few other generic-ish space sets you can find just by putting "space" into the search bar on the Lego site: https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-roving-vehicle-60348 https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-roving-vehicle-6034... (cheaper, similar play value) https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-space-station-60349 https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-space-station-60349 (slightly more expensive, bigger) https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-research-base-60350 https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-research-base-60350 (more expensive, but much bigger) The space sets are definitely there in general, they're just a sub-theme of "City" now for some reason. There's also a few space fantasy sets under the Monkie Kid line, like https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/chang-e-moon-cake-factory-80032 https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/chang-e-moon-cake-factory... and its rabbit-piloted moon mecha.
• rnernento 5y ago
  Legos are still one of the most satisfying toys to buy your children. Yes they are expensive, yes it's annoying that a lot of them are built just once. That being said when you look out at the competition the bar is low. I have a 5 and 3 year old and watching them patiently page through the instructions and put together something complex that they really care about is incredibly satisfying. Some of the sets have relatively complex mechanisms in them as well (I'm thinking specifically of the Lego Friends Shopping Mall and the Minecraft sets) and the kids are forced to understand them at least on some level. I don't know that my daughter would be interested in classic Legos, it's Lego Friends that caught her and will keep her in front of a 200 page instruction manual for 4 hours and in my mind there's nothing wrong with that.
  • nix23 5y ago
    >That being said when you look out at the competition the bar is low. Bluebrixx, Cobi and Xingbao are probably much better.
    • thot_experiment 5y ago
      I would be absolutely floored if any of those other toy brick manufacturer had the quality of LEGO, they are injection molding wizards.
      • Xylakant 5y ago
        I haven’t tried a kit of those three mentioned, only other competitors, but brick quality hasn’t been any different from Lego.
        • wink 5y ago
          I have one Cobi model and while it hasn't been playtested by a kid longterm the bricks look solid and the model looks good.
      • amelius 5y ago
        Doesn't the actual injection molding happen in China anyway? Wouldn't it be more surprising if the Chinese didn't learn the tricks of the trade by now?
• deleted 5y ago
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• watwut 5y ago
  > Lego did extensive research and found that girls preferred to play with the characters rather than build sets. So they created the Lego Friends line where the characters own beauty salons, pet boutiques and can be news reporters working on stories about cakes. The sets do not come with hundreds of pages of instructions because most of them are fairly simple to build. The Lego Friends line is immensely popular. 1.) Majority of lego sets kinds have characters in them. That includes Star Wars sets, Ninja go sets, knights sets and what not. Lego Friends having characters in them is not something unique. 2.) Also, lego sets marked for similar age brackets have similarly complex manuals. It is just not true that Lego Friends for 7 years old would be much less complex them Minecraft for 7 years old or City for 7 years old. 3.) The actual study lego made and wrote about distinguished "indoor vs outdoor" as differing preference between boys and girls. And I think "a lot of details" in that indoor (not sure about this one). This is the first time I hear about the difference being "character vs building". Which does not even match what sets lego makes. Knights series are all about characters. > Last year, Lego created a female scientist set on a limited run. It sold out quickly. The special thing about this was that they were based on actual real world scientists. It was very much collector item.
• shantara 5y ago
  I went through an experience of picking up LEGO Christmas gifts for my little cousins (boys and girls, age 6-11). It was very difficult to find anything that wasn't a promo for a massive Disney franchise. After filtering by the age group and removing all comic book/movie/cartoon tie-ins on LEGO website, what was left was just several options for each child. I may be misremembering, but when I was a kid in the 90s there was a much larger variety of sets to pick from. As a space nerd I love their ISS, Shuttle and Apollo themed sets, but it's still disappointing how limited are their kids' options these days.
• ezconnect 5y ago
  When I was a kid I always wanted to build a doll house because of the intricate details you can see inside the house. It was so hard I gave up and just bought scale model planes then use firecrackers to blow them up during new year. You will never experience the freedom of a kid once you're an adult.
• cosmodisk 5y ago
  When my daughter was about 3 years old,I went on Ebay and bought a huge bag of used Lego. I think it was 10KG or so. My wife nearly got a heart attack, especially when I poured all those little pieces into the bath and filled it up with water,so I could wash them a bit. Then ended up catching the smallest pieces when I pulled the plug. We poured all those pieces in the living room. Took like 3 days to dry out. We built so many things since then. There are lots of sets mixed together,I don't care nor does my daughter. It's still nice to build something, especially when all you do at work is sending emails and writing some code here and there.
  • eru 5y ago
    The advice I got was to stick your dirty second-hand Lego in a pillow case, zip it shut, and put it through the washing machine. Though that route can only take quite a bit less than 10kg at a time.
    • nkrisc 5y ago
      Glad to get this advice. My parents sent me all my old LEGOs a while ago and I’m still in the process of disassembling all the sets, though at least organized into plates, bricks, etc. Fortunately I know they’re not truly dirty, though they’re still pretty dusty so a good wash will help.
      • phil21 5y ago
        Dishwasher (on low temp) also works fairly well, just don't use any (or a very small amount) of detergent. I like to put about 1kg or so in the "delicates" laundry mesh bags when I have a lot of used legos to wash. Also need to reiterate do not heat dry or use hot cycles if you go this route :)
        • delecti 5y ago
          They're made of ABS, which doesn't begin to soften until a bit over the boiling point of water (~104-105 C). It's a bit close to risk it, but even the hot cycle might be fine as long as it doesn't go much past boiling off the water. Definitely avoid cleaning with acetone though; that'll turn it into goo.
• SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
  I started reading disagreeing with many points of the article, I did realize that she is from a different generation then me, so her "then vs now" is very different from my "than vs now". But still, when I look at what sets were available when she was a child I would say that her points "1. The instructions", "2. The sets", and "The building method"; were based mostly on what specific sets she happened to have, and no on what sets were available at the time. Yes, up until the 60s (before even that author's time), Lego sets were mostly generic bricks with just a small set of specialized pieces (just some wheels, doors and windows), for example sets of the "Universal Building Set" family [0] like the one pictured early in the article. But by the time of most of our childhoods (the 70s or even 80s), Lego had already introduced sets with plenty of specialized pieces. Also at that time they already introduced some more complex sets tailored for a specific build, some of them, the kind of set some people may chose to build only once (as if it was a glue-on plastic model kit). The thing is, most rants about old Lego being better more generic, are just misguided rose-tinted nostalgia talking. Lego still sells awesome generic sets, even better than the ones we used to have when we were kids. They just happen to also sell some hobbyist sets. For example, my son's big box consists of a mix of my old 80s era (e.g. [1]) plus my niece's 00s era (e.g.[2]) Legos, and I have to say that the 00s era is much more generic and full of bricks, allowing for much more varied imaginative play, than my old 80s spaceship sets full of large single-use pieces. [0] https://brickset.com/sets/theme-Universal-Building-Set https://brickset.com/sets/theme-Universal-Building-Set [1] https://rebrickable.com/sets/6971-1/inter-galactic-command-base/ https://rebrickable.com/sets/6971-1/inter-galactic-command-b... [2] https://rebrickable.com/sets/31025-1/mountain-hut/ https://rebrickable.com/sets/31025-1/mountain-hut/
• tweetle_beetle 5y ago
  I find the act of building a set and putting it on a shelf to gather dust a bit sad, but big piles of similar shaped blocks are also a bit uninspiring. So I was pleasantly surprised to find the BricQ Motion sets aimed at classroom use. They come with lessons plans and videos to give some direction, but even without them it's a great self-contained box with very carefully selected pieces to encourage learning about physics and a pile of more "silly" pieces to add character. There's a good selection of wheels, springs, weighted blocks, "ropes" and Technics style pieces. They come in a segmented tray and are colour coded to make finding particular blocks and experiment with related blocks easier. I think they're the best of both - experiment, solve a challenge, learn something, build nonsense and then break it all up and put it away neatly ready to do it again. Big hit compared to sets.
• huhtenberg 5y ago
  The main difference is that the sets and instructions got way more complicated and elaborate. So much so that they stifle and discourage the creativity instead of feeding it. The first set I had was a minuscule "mineral detector" from the space set - https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/001.jpg https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/001.jpg There were 6-step instructions [2,3] AND there was a separate page with what else was buildable from the set [4]. That was the Lego magic ingredient, the most crucial part. It forced one to look and think and imagine how those extra models were put together. That, in turn, kick-started the process of trying other things. Above all, all of it was simple. So when you got more sets you'd look at the instructions as a starting point only and then dive right into building the alternatives. Modern sets have none of that. If anything, they basically demonstrate that you can't possibly come up with the thing you are building on your own. No way. And whatever you can put together will be so inferior in comparison that it's not even worth trying. It's really sad what Lego did to itself, because it was something magical :-/ [2] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/002.jpg https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/002.jpg [3] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/003.jpg https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/003.jpg [4] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/004.jpg https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/004.jpg
  • watwut 5y ago
    https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/the-fox-lodge-21178 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/the-fox-lodge-21178 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bricks-and-houses-11008 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bricks-and-houses-11008 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/creative-suitcase-10713 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/creative-suitcase-10713
  • tills13 5y ago
    first-party extra models: https://www.lego.com/en-my/service/help/bricks-and-sets/building-instructions/additional-instructions-blt2c8ffc2c6ffa17b8 https://www.lego.com/en-my/service/help/bricks-and-sets/buil... third-party extra models: https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/ https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/
    • 5y ago
• robertlagrant 5y ago
  > It would appear that, in the 1970s, equality of the sexes and creativity was the end goal for Lego No. Saying you can buy your daughter a spaceship and your son a doll house doesn't mean that was your end goal. More likely, having to come up with fewer differentiated toys to sell, i.e. broadening the market, was. I'm not saying that equality (although playing with nontraditional toys isn't synonymous with that) be an aim, but it's not the most obvious "end goal" explanation.
• wiredfool 5y ago
  Eh, I think the biggest change is that technic style bricks are pushed down much farther in the line than they used to be (late 70's early 80's). There are a lot more moving parts, more wheel and tire styles, and the average part is now a 1x or flat rather than a full height 2x4. There's also just a lot more sets and options. The other big change is that all of the sets have instructions that the kids seem to start out following, and some of that comes from the branding, but some also comes from the more complicated nature of the more technic style sets. There are a couple of unique parts per set, but nowhere near what most pundits claim. Most of the parts are interchangable for builds, especially if you're not too worried about the colors. (source, 3 kids now in their teens with 10+ years of someone getting at least one set for christmas/birthday, and 1/3 m^3 of lego that's less and less used now. And my own collection of ~ 1/2 ft^3 from way back when)
• biorach 5y ago
  Yes, many, but not all, Lego sets these days are more specific and have more specialised parts. But in the end, most children end up with a big box with a jumble of many sets, same as past decades. Maybe the first few days of a new set being introduced is dominated by following the instructions, but after that imagination takes over. My son and his friends played with Lego for over 10 years - there are few toys that comes even close in terms of longevity and value for money (despite the high up-front cost).
• thrower123 5y ago
  You have to go way, way back to the 70s or very early 80s for some imagined Golden Age of Lego where the things this article is moaning about were not the case. The most concerning issue with Lego to my mind is that they seem to be creatively bankrupt. Licensed IP kept the company afloat in their dark days, but they don't even try to put out their own themes anymore.
• glanzwulf 5y ago
  Alternatively we could say Lego didn't change that much. We still have Lego classic which is still quite popular and often out of stock. So other than advertising I think nothing else changed Now it's true that there are new alternative "lines" to bring in new people, but we also had that back in the day. I remember when I got my first Lego Technic for example.
• gilbetron 5y ago
  I really dislike all the bizarre "lego ain't what they used to be!" comments - they honestly come from people who haven't spent time with modern legos. For reference I was born in 1970 and played with legos probably from 1975-1985, and then seriously picked it up again in 2012 or so when my son was old enough to play with them. People paint this picture of these new legos that are made up of like 5 parts that you just click together and have a transformer or something. Reality is far from that - there are so many cool pieces that let you build things never before possible. I was going to make an analogy about it being like having 100 crayon colors instead of 1, but it is more like having a whole artist's toolbox at your disposal, including 100 crayons. People say, "but it is too complicated!" - well then just buy the classic bricks, they are easy to purchase in bulk, and you can find lots of instructions all over the place for fun ideas to learn with. And then there's this weird idea that it is so complicated that you have to build it once and then never take it apart. Please, taking it apart was a huge amount of the fun for my son. He'd repurpose parts into his never ending scene that sprawled a 10x10 area in our family room. He (and us) would play with them literally daily for at least an hour, if not more, adding sets as they came along. Much of it stayed in bins, just because he had so much (youngest child of a youngest child, means you have lots of generous Aunts, Uncles, and cousins!). Even now, at 13, he literally was putting a set together with is friend just yesterday. It's rarer now, since he likes the intense interactively of computer-based "legos" (People Playground, Minecraft, Garry's Mod, Teardown, and modding for other games, not to mention VR stuff). Modern legos are awesome.
  • enriquto 5y ago
    > Modern legos are awesome. Indeed they are! But, as much as I also dislike, like you, these bizarre comments; there's one place where I drew a red line and lego has sadly crossed it recently: lego sets that become obsoleted because lego removes some software from the app store. Previously, sets were standalone and eternal. But today you can buy an awesome technic set that will become "bricked" in a few years when they remove the controller software from the play store. This is not a theoretical concern. It has already happened (even for sets that were still on sale!). It sucks big time and it is really sad. If at least the apps were free software, we would have something to hang on to defend lego. But their current stance is indefensible.
• flerchin 5y ago
  Soda was sweeter when I was a kid. The playgrounds were taller. I never needed money. Cartoons were so good I could sit and watch them for hours after school everyday, and the advertisements never bothered me. My computer had a 4MB hard drive, and that was enough for everything I ever needed. My Dad still loved my mom...
• MikeMacMan 5y ago
  Reminds me of this brief scene from Community. RIP Michael K Williams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8e2f9j-iJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8e2f9j-iJo
  • seFausto 5y ago
    I knew this would come up! "What happened to Lego? they use to be simple"
• dirtyid 5y ago
  I was fortunate enough to have the "right" amount of legos, enough that I could mostly build what I wanted but not enough that I was always missing pieces / colours and pushed to engineer around limitations. I credit legos to developing my mechanical and spatial aptitude. I remember playing with less fortunate collections and wonder if these qualities would have been stunted if I had less, or if I could have been spoiled if given too much. I do know I'm very envious of not growing up with minecraft where having unlimited resources or being forced to manage resource seem to develop more skills. What's the situation with building legos in VR?
• iamkroot 5y ago
  I was a Lego obsessed kid through the 90s and 00s, and now I have a school age son who is similarly devoted to it. Lego today is waaaayyy cooler than it was when I was a kid. I got the very first Lego Star Wars set, Lukes X-Wing [1], and while I loved it as a kid the newest Xwing that my son just got [2] is so much better on every level. It's bigger, more detailed, looks sleeker, and has this really clever mechanism that opens the wings synchronously when you press down on a piece. All the new sets are this way. The care and detail that Lego puts into them has dramatically improved in the last 20 years. He still takes them apart a few months after he gets them and builds something new. I don't think that will ever change, the thrill of making something on your own will never go away. Furthermore, the online community of people making things and sharing their creations has exploded since I was a child. We had a single user forum (LUGnet) where a small handful of people congregated. All images were uploaded to a single, tiny website (brickshelf) to be shared. Now you have youtube channels, instagram pages, tiktok creators, subreddits, you name it. The resources available for creating and sharing your own designs is massive! 1: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9yXo6HF8hTo/hqdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9yXo6HF8hTo/hqdefault.jpg 2: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/luke-skywalker-s-x-wing-fighter-75301 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/luke-skywalker-s-x-wing-f...
• bluefirebrand 5y ago
  All I want from Lego these days is a reintroduction of a full medieval Castle style lineup again. If they did I think I would collect and build the entire lineup. I see things like the Medieval Blacksmith set and I want an entire village and castle like that theme.
• retSava 5y ago
  I feel many of those points ring true, in our case. What I discovered was that Minecraft is the Lego of today, but digital. It fills many of the same creative urges. We have quite some Lego Friends and different kits on shelves, which can't be touched according to the Creator :). A big bag of second hand parts lies in peace, but Minecraft on the PS5 is now the go-to. We sometimes play 2 player together, building things. Basically almost always in "creative mode", and never online. I kind of wanted my daughter to feel the same positive way as I did with Lego, but no dice. Minecraft seems to do that.
• robotnikman 5y ago
  I still have tubs full of legos sitting in the attic. My favorite moments as a kid were starting with a lego mindstorms kit, I think that ended up leading me down a path where I started to learn programing.
• kergonath 5y ago
  I was a kid in the 1990s, and my parents were already making the same complaints (except for the film merch one). The kits haven’t changed that much in the last 30 years. At least those for kids; there weren’t many kits for adults back then. I hate the branded kits with a passion (Batman and the others), but thankfully there are many others available, including great ones. I would have killed for a rocket like the newer ones when I was 10. OTOH recent trains are not much better than older ones.
• giantg2 5y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong, but the vibe I get from the article is that Lego has become less creative and more about marketing/profit; sort of faulting Lego. I think this shift to complex, structured sets says more about the parents than the company though. Unstructured/unguided sets are still available. It seems many more parents today want brag about what their kid did, want some Instagram worthy end product, or instill that structured/conforming result-driven mindset today. Again, I could be wrong about all this. This certainly isn't every parent, but I just feel like it's a larger percentage than the past, just like the amount of time kids spend in structured groups/activities vs self-organizined friend groups running around the neighborhood.
  • makeitdouble 5y ago
    From the post: > Now: The bricks still exist, obviously, but now each set contains many odd shapes that are specific to that particular set and do not work with any other creation. To further this point, there are central components like motored hubs that are only available to specific sets and can't be bought as individual pieces. A lot of people will point at token actions Lego still does that match the old philosophy, but at its core Lego thinks in sets, and new pieces, new mechanisms etc. are introduced for specific sets, never in the buckets.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      Well sure, new pieces and specialized pieces are going to be sold in the set they work with. The point is, parents are choosing to buy the new sets with specialized pieces. You can also see in the article the points about the parents being frustrated while building, sad when the set is destroyed, etc. So yeah, Lego is marketing and making profit, but it's the parents that drive/enable that. As stated before, we see this in other areas of life too with the full schedules of structured group activities and less self organized time.
      • makeitdouble 5y ago
        There's different categories of what you call "specialized" pieces though. Some only make sense in a specific set (e.g. a light saber piece in a Star Wars set), and some are completely generic but only exist in the sets that couldn't work without them. It might be different now, but for a while you couldn't get the 4 ports Power Control Hub outside of 2 or 3 sets. You could buy weaker and bulkier hubs separately, but the specific smaller new generation hub only came in sets. It's interesting listening to Lego designer interviews, when asked about future plans they'll often mention that some development is totally possible, they'll just have to wait for a set that makes use of it.
• cestith 5y ago
  If you don't like the licensed sets, or even sets with instruction books, then you're still covered. Lego, Mega Bloks, and others have buckets or bags of just parts. To stick to Lego without a themed set, look for The Lego Classic line. If you want them as a themed set but maybe without a media license, there's the Lego Creator line (which does include some licensed material like the Bond 007 Aston Martin DB5). Kit 10698 is a decent value for building toys and comes with its own storage container. Hasbro has multiple brands of brick building sets, but under their Kreo line there's A4585 or A4584 value buckets. I have a 759-piece Zuru Max bucket that's like $20 - the pieces fit but the quality/durability feels a little less than Lego or MEGA.
  • thesuitonym 5y ago
    This is it. People often complain that Lego is all about licensed sets, and yeah, that type of set has taken over your local toy aisle, but the regular sets are still there, and there are even more of them that there used to be. The only real change is that Lego gives kids more choice.
    • mortenjorck 5y ago
      It's not all that different from an independent record store promoting the latest collectible vinyl drop to pay the bills so they can continue selling niche recordings, or an independent theater playing Marvel titles so they can afford to run arthouse fare. Lego has adopted the "keep a corporate job to fund your side projects" outlook, and given the consistent results in the Creator series and the continuing legacy of classic product lines, more power to them.
      • nimajneb 5y ago
        I really enjoy the Creator series. I don't really have money to spend more than $30 on a set at a time. It's also cool all(?) of them are 3 in 1, so you can choose between 3 instructions. It's fun to mix them and build new as well.
  • dawnerd 5y ago
• Fnoord 5y ago
  > Lego did extensive research and found that girls preferred to play with the characters rather than build sets. I barely roleplayed with Lego, I was all about building (first by following the exact instructions, then by ignoring them and trying to figure it out on my own, and finally by building my own stuff based on my own imagination). When I became about 11 or 12 I finally got, via a friend, into roleplaying, with Lego (I got bored of the other 3 purposes). He used the lego in the garden and made entire plays with stories, and I joined in, and we co-interacted a lot. I didn't even know you could roleplay like that! His parents and me, we kinda didn't like each other (they were quite hardcore Christian, while my parents were more loose Christians who let me decide for myself and I was atheist from elementary school because even at age 5 or 6 I asked questions with answers which I found inconsistent in [the] religion and ended up seeing it as just a story). Eventually that difference between us ended our friendship. I look back fondly to my past friendships.
• The-Bus 5y ago
  Today's Parent dot com, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent article were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. With that out of the way, let me try and address this article, as someone who played with LEGO bricks in the 1980s and 1990s and has offspring that do so today: 1. The Instructions: There are more instructions in sets that are complex. The Model Team truck and helicopter set had 1,000+ pieces and tons of instructions almost thirty years ago. [1] There are still sufficient sets that are not complex and a wide variety of sets that come with no instructions. Not a valid argument. 2. The sets: Again, another fallacy. Non-branded sets still exist. Branded sets existed twenty years ago. This is a complaint about bad parenting (giving in to every demand from your children), not Lego. 3. The building method: Another fallacy. The building methods are up to individuals. You are free to buy whatever set you want and build whatever you want. You are, in fact, still allowed to take apart sets the day after you make them. (I notice that my children are very excited to do this as I was at their age but I am not). 4. Gendered toys: I have pored over local bylaws, UN directives, and have asked my priest. You can buy a Lego Friends set for your son, and a Lego Speed Champions set for your daughter. This is a parenting problem, not a Lego problem. 5. The advertising: This may be a valid point, but not for this argument because it does not affect the toys themselves any more than I could buy Legos at Toys R Us thirty years ago but not today. 6&7. The blocks & minifigs: Simple blocks are still available and you can build exclusively with those if you wish. Minifig choices are better as it allows to build different things (i.e. the cast of Top Gear UK). 8. Branding: I don't like branding in Lego, but this has been the case for at least twenty years. If you don't like the branding, you can buy unbranded sets. 1 = https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=5590-1#T=S&O={%22iconly%22:0} https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=5590...
• MarkusWandel 5y ago
  Genuinely curious: Has anyone here personally experienced a <20 year old doing real engineering with the modern "studless" technical Legos? You can find truly awesome contraptions on Youtube, sure. But has anyone seen it first hand? The old "build from the bottom" Lego Technic was just so inviting for technical tinkering. We built all kinds of machinery out of them. Not kids any more on this occasion; we dug out the Legos from the late 1970s to play with them just for fun once we were grown up. But representative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw3dUbRfMSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw3dUbRfMSw The "What it is, is beautiful" aesthetic. Who cares what colour a piece is; it's the shape that matters. In this respect, Lego has changed. Sure you can still get buckets of basic parts to build with, but the Technic sets of easy-to-engineer-with parts, with lots of the studded beams and the ever so handy 40 tooth gears have gone away.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • oaiey 5y ago
    LEGO Technic is different. I was a vivid user as child and now as adult I rediscovered it. It is indeed more challenging to build inside out (what you need with the new beams/pins) than bottom up (old stackable & studded beams). I however, would not agree with your statement that this block kids. I think nowadays tinkering is possible with so many more things than when I have been small. I had LEGO and alternatively real tools with wood. Nowadays, you have that and also things like Minecraft, Gravitrax, City Skylines, .. Also LEGO Technic is too expensive. I luckily bought the 42082 giving me 4000pc for 160€ ... but usually that many pieces would go for 400€. And what I have is a bare minimum to build something meaningful like a robot arm, plotting thingy, some cars, etc. The modern Technic motors/battery hubs are also extremely expensive (ignoring the other flaws). I think the kids have so many choices that they do not pick up LEGO Technic for the price.
  • orthoxerox 5y ago
    I remember my old studded Technic sets fondly. Back then you could at least see what you were building a few steps in. I bought and built a Jeep Wrangler set a couple of months ago, and I have no idea if I will ever be able to come up with an original Technic design myself using modern studless beams. I had no idea what I was building at least halfway into the instruction booklet.
• raldi 5y ago
  What exactly is wrong with Lego making a line of products for children who prefer to play with the characters than build complex models? Particularly when it was based on extensive research rather than just prejudice.
• furyofantares 5y ago
  In any creative endeavor, be it lego or minecraft or anything else, you can endlessly watch the global greatest hits on youtube, things you have no chance of "competing" with. I have no idea how this affects people growing up in this environment. Is it stifling? Inspiring? Just normal, since you start out as a kid not knowing how to do anything and surrounded by people who do? How different is it really from how we grew up, listening to professional music, surrounded by professional visual art? I don't know any of the answers. But I'm grateful that my kid can assemble a complex thing from a lego kit. For her, it looks empowering to me. And when she's done, she almost immediately starts tweaking it, then disassembles it completely within a few days and the kit ends up in the pile of assorted bricks for "free play."
  • tasha0663 5y ago
    > you can endlessly watch the global greatest hits on youtube, things you have no chance of "competing" with I think it is pretty much normal. I'm reading Art & Fear (1985) right now, and it discusses a lot of myths about talent and genius that would be relevant to this. Whenever my kids ask me how I got to my level of ability in art or music, I make sure to let them see paintings and prints that I abandoned on the way to a final piece. They see me reworking things on the light box. They hear me practice and flub my scales. I'm at least trying to instill the notion that there's always an effort and a huge mess on the cutting room floor.
• layer8 5y ago
  The bricks also look cheaper (slightly glaze-like surface) since they started using the same translucent-white pellets for all colors, just with different dyes added when injecting the moulds, instead of full-colored pellets, around 2000. It’s also a pity they changed the gray colors from neutral-warm to the bluish grays, which to my eyes slightly clash with most of the other colors. Along with the changes to the available bricks, sets and minifigures as mentioned in the article, this made me lose interest in "modern" Lego.
• onpensionsterm 5y ago
  That's not the original minifig. That's not even the original minifig that had a face. https://blog.hobbydb.com/2018/11/05/the-evolution-of-lego-minifigs-brick-by-brick/ https://blog.hobbydb.com/2018/11/05/the-evolution-of-lego-mi...
• asiachick 5y ago
  I thought the Mario sets were pretty awesome. My friends kids showed me there and I had to have them too. Mario also Bluetooth connects to a smartphone for various activities and there are 3d rotatable build instructions https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq3hw4imZ3g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq3hw4imZ3g
• Andrex 5y ago
  Good. If Lego won't evolve, they'll die. I'm glad Lego is still around and thriving, as that didn't always seem like it would be the case (from my personal experience as a kid).
• travisgriggs 5y ago
  Legos are like coding. The simplicity of Lego yesteryear was like some of the simpler programming languages out there. Approachable and rewarding, but limited. Over the years, the language of Lego has added new programming constructs and is inherently more complex, more capable, and harder to approach. The evolutions the article describes may be deplorable to some, but it was adapt or die. Anyone playing with Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, or Erector Sets anymore? I am 51 and still collect Lego. I realized some years ago, that my own four kids were not getting the same enjoyment out of them that I had. Chagrineldy I realized that in my attempt to help them love them, I had over glutted them. Two large bins (the kind you put in the back of pickup trucks), an explosion of piece types, and an explosion of color, made it too difficult to find the piece you wanted. So I sorted them. Today, I have more than 200 clear Sterilite storage containers with the whole collection sorted by basic shapes or types. Some are very specific (2x4 bricks), some more of a category (all technic gears). I had tried sorting them by color in the past, but all that led to was very mono color creations. When I build something, I use the whole set. But when grandkids and nephew/nieces come, I just get a few of them out. With about 20 boxes, it returns to that simple approachable phase and they do the coolest things. You can get a lot of mileage out of just the plates and bricks, plus one or two of the “specialty” boxes thrown in for grins (e.g. two of my nephews just love the big box of wheels). The most popular boxes are still the minifig boxes: heads, hats, vests, torsos, legs, tools, animals, foods, weapons. They’ll “play dolls” with those all day. They generally push the few Friends pieces out of the way. When the kids were younger, we used to do a monthly bricklink order as a group. My 3 girls always opted for more female hair pieces.
  • travisgriggs 5y ago
    One additional thing… Reason 9 from the articles is exactly why no on plays with my Lego except in bare feet. Little shod feet break Lego. Little bare feet learn not to step on Lego.
  • dhosek 5y ago
    My brother found some Tinker Toy sets that he gave my kids for Christmas a few years ago. They loved playing with them.
• brjiro8 5y ago
  They’re also not as well made. My kids newer fire station set has had multiple blocks crack in the last couple years, and he’s not rough on them. He bashes his action figures up but simply builds legos. Fortunately my mom hung onto my stash and we were able to swap out parts right away. The aged coloring adds artistic texture. Still a bummer to spend $30-$40 and if you don’t have a bunch of spares when blocks crack, you’re left with an set that can never be completely built. Been wondering if a 3D printer is the way to go for this sort of thing now. Make action figures in parts.
• ysamjo 5y ago
  Lego really dialed the monopoly rent to 11. I wonder what the material cost for a 2,000 pieces set really is? After all it's a bunch of formed plastic pellets. My journey and a product idea: https://medium.com/hyperlinked/whats-missing-creator-platform-for-lego-bricks-94e6dfc5afcf https://medium.com/hyperlinked/whats-missing-creator-platfor...
  • tills13 5y ago
    Seems like you're missing the part where they have to pay someone (or more accurately, entire teams of people) a lot of money to actually come up with the set idea and instructions. Boiling LEGO down to just "a bunch of formed plastic" is criminal.
    • ysamjo 5y ago
      Please read the article before you write a comment. I explicitly said in it that LEGO is successful because of the combination of instructions and plastic. I further argue that you could unlock value by unbundle the two. If you have salary data on LEGO designers please share. In the meantime I assume a good model designer would make more in the described platform model. (Comparable to a newspaper journalist going solo with Substack.)
• deleted 5y ago
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• tasha0663 5y ago
  > Blocks hide in the carpet until you are walking around barefoot in the dark. The pain of stepping on a a sharp Lego piece is not easily forgotten. My first parenting superpower was the ability to step softly on Lego bricks. If I'm in a serious hurry, I'll even grip the thing with my foot and keep walking.
• clean_send 5y ago
  A good hack to getting lots of random legos cheap is buying bulk lots off of eBay. Most people sell by the pound and it’s always fun to see what you’ll get!
• dekhn 5y ago
  I've been trying to find an article I read as a kid (late 70s) about a guy who made custom LEGO models, by putting bricks together incompletely. Like, you can make a cylinder with slightly-out-of-perfect snap-together pieces. I think he made a 747 out of regular pieces. At the time I don't think I was even aware of model kits.
• chasing 5y ago
  I have some issues with Legos, but a lot of these criticisms do not at all match my experience. For example, there are a crazy number of Lego shapes these days, but the degree to which they fit together satisfyingly — even in unexpected ways — is amazing. And I love this about Legos, and it's so much more interesting than just blocks. My kid builds whole scenes and detailed models thanks to the wide variety of little "unique" pieces. And from what I've seen, sets these days are big idea factories: My kid will build what's in the instructions a couple of times to learn it, and then will take things apart and do his own thing with it, make his own creations. I love that he gets an example and learns new techniques with these big sets and then applies that to his own ideas. The branded Lego stuff I don't care for — I'd rather kids think about actual space exploration rather than Star Wars, for example — but I appreciate how Legos are designed and sold right now.
• throw7 5y ago
  I loved the general lego sets I had as a kid. One year my parents had gone on a short vacation to europe (germany?) and returned with an "expert lego system" kit of a front loader. Once built you could raise/lower and dump the bucket. Man I loved that thing also. One can like both types of "kits".
• partiallypro 5y ago
  I kind of don't like the huge push for sets, because it feels like it ruins childhood imagination. You're just following instructions and not actively building something new. I know Lego sells the "Classic" sets, but it's usually harder to find and relegated to the clearance aisle.
• robbrown451 5y ago
  I enjoy modern Legos (with my now 7 year old) but only because I have them a giant bin, unsorted. I managed to get an enormous collection for $150 from a kid that I guess was growing out of them and wanted the money. And I immediately disassembled all the "kits" (like the Slave I ship now known as "Boba Fett's Firespray gunship") so they were just random pieces. Yes it is fun that there are a ton of weird minifigures, some recognizable and some not. There are all kinds of interesting pieces in there. But I really hate the idea that you should approach it like an airplane model or the like, where you put it together the one correct way. That is boring. I don't expect to ever buy a kit like that.
• alfor 5y ago
  Is it still controversial that girls have different interest than boys? Please stop pushing ideology and let kid be. I can see it plainly with my kids and with my wife and that is fine. It is just our nature expressing itself with variations through each person.
• bondolo 5y ago
  One thing that seems to have changed is the understanding of impermanence. I loved the things I built with Lego but quickly had to accept that none of them was permanent. Kill your darlings to build the next thing. Being too enamoured with what you built before reduced your options for building new creations and you found that you loved nothing so much that you weren't willing to destroy it to accomplish your new goals.
• deltaonefour 5y ago
  >The ads were just plain awesome. Case in point: This 1981 ad featuring a young girl with her Lego creation. That picture of the girl holding up a lego set is only "AWESOME" for parents. As a kid if I saw that I would barf. First off as a little boy back then... there was no gender equality. All girls were stupid and had cooties and I was a little sexist tyrant. Second little boys aren't dumb... that blob of a thing made by girl is infinitely less interesting then a space ship designed by a professional adult with a cool color scheme. Case in point I loved the M-tron series: https://imgur.com/a/bK7w8 https://imgur.com/a/bK7w8. Of course being a little boy my skills were only good enough to produce that multi colored blob but that doesn't change the fact that I knew what quality was when I saw it. This article is just an adult projecting his opinion and woke sensibilities onto a kid. That being said yes it's ok for a boy to like doll houses. Perfectly fine, but let's be real, legos are mostly for boys and most boys would prefer dinosaurs over doll houses and any advertising that doesn't target that is advertising that doesn't understand the majority of its target demographic. My main argument is against the author of the article and their complete blissful ignorance about how kids think. Lego knew their shit though. That photo is an ad targetted towards parents. The M-tron legos had advertising targeted directly towards me when I was a kid, while this article on the other hand is an article targeting parents who don't understand how kids think.
  • destitude 5y ago
    I think you are missing the point.. The gender equality was portrayed by the company and therefore picked up by the parents. Nothing to do with what little boys thought of girls. Today you have marketing pre-disposing parents to thinking girls should follow X interests and boys Y. This is big part of why we have lack of females in STEM since for example "girls" Legos shows they should just worry about beauty salons and not rocket ships.
    • deltaonefour 5y ago
      >The gender equality was portrayed by the company and therefore picked up by the parents. Nothing to do with what little boys thought of girls. I know. Legos has two modes of advertising. One targeting parents, the other targeting kids. Both were accurate in their objectives. However the article itself fails to understand the psychology of kids. > This is big part of why we have lack of females in STEM since for example "girls" Legos shows they should just worry about beauty salons and not rocket ships. Don't want to turn it into a huge debate about gender stuff. All I can say is I disagree. Male and female preferences influence the advertising and the advertising in turn does influence preference but to a much lesser degree. Many studies show that the interest is innate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox You can disagree, but there's no point in turning this into a debate... let's just agree that there's controversy around this area and definitely a lot of interest groups seek to color this area with their own agendas.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  I grew up in the classic space era (of course the best, but then again everyone's childhood pop culture is "the best"). The #1 thing that should be emphasized is that lego is cheaper than it was back when I had it. I think that's a good thing. What would I really like? I'd like Lego to do re-releases of old sets that are 20 or 30 years old. Or maybe megasets that re-release the entire year's sets for a line (Take my money for a UCS millenium falcon-pricepoint of all of the classic sets from 1980/1981 re-released) I bought a ton of used legos on CL (too much of course) when my kiddo was born. Then I sorted them to get a feel for the new pieces. I think wheels are better (there's basically 2-3 axle standards which I think is an improvement). I think the main bad thing is that there are too many colors and shades, due likely to over-perfecting a branded set or something like that (or its a conspiracy). The minifigs are a bit much sometimes, but I don't think it's that bad. THey still are largely minifigs. The amount of cool MOC/custom builds on the internet is great. The other great thing I didn't have was digital photography: I didn't want to take apart my own models as a kid because I know I'd never be able to rebuild them. Now you can take a whole bunch of pictures to remember it and rebuild it if I wanted to. I do think the overbranding of sets leads to them not being deconstructed. But I bought a ton of "spare bricks" so I don't think we'll have that problem. When lego does an occasional "classic space"-ish set like the mars rover or the mech, it is amazing. The creator sets are great.
• belval 5y ago
  It's fun when you read an article about lego changing and realize that the author is old enough that the "new" legos he's talking about are actually the legos you played with when you were ~6-7 years old. Take it from an adult raised with "new" legos, if your kid has some imagination, it does not really matter if the kit is made with simple bricks or more complex pieces with a rudimentary mechanism, I had ton of fun with those.
  • kzzzznot 5y ago
    This is a really refreshing point.
• NeoTar 5y ago
  On behalf of all Europeans, can I express the sentiment: LEGO is a brand, LEGO Bricks, or LEGO pieces are the individual bricks/tiles/plates, etc. 'Legos' looks very wrong to us.
• gjvc 5y ago
  Lego, singular. Never "Legos".
• leokennis 5y ago
  Large amount of “old man yells at cloud” going on here. Lego is still fantastic. My kids love them. They can build a cool ninja car or a police plane or a house. And later recombine the three into a fantasy jeep-truck combo with a ramp. The bricks are durable as f*ck. They learn fine motor skills. They learn to read instructions. They get creative. They role play. There’s really no need to gatekeep Lego.
• sequoia 5y ago
  > Lego did extensive research and found that girls preferred to play with the characters rather than build sets. So they created the Lego Friends line where the characters own beauty salons, pet boutiques and can be news reporters working on stories about cakes. The sets do not come with hundreds of pages of instructions because most of them are fairly simple to build. The Lego Friends line is immensely popular. i.e. they figured out what the market wanted, then sold that thing, and it was profitable. I too prefer older legos but if people generally prefer another kind, what is lego supposed to do? The market also isn't the same as it was in 1980, how realistic is it to expect their offerings to be the same?
• sparrc 5y ago
  A few counterpoints: - LEGO still makes bins of fairly generic pieces that can be built into all sorts of things: https://smile.amazon.com/LEGO-Classic-Medium-Creative-Brick/dp/B00NHQFA1I/ https://smile.amazon.com/LEGO-Classic-Medium-Creative-Brick/... - My daughter has a few LEGO duplo sets. One for example had instructions for building a Minnie Mouse house, but we only did that once. Now all the sets are taken apart and mixed together and she pretty much builds whatever she wants, mixing and building with pieces from 4-5 different duplo sets together. - It's super easy to buy bins of used legos online, especially in local parenting communities. I see people exchanging bins of LEGO pieces all the time and usually it's just bins of pieces, no instructions or defined sets or plans at all.
• dudul 5y ago
  One thing that has changed is the quality of some of the bricks. I used to play with Legos in the 80's. I had dozens and dozens of sets that my parents kept, and now my kids are playing with them. Very very few pieces are broken. Compare that with the current sets. My kids have a few of these and parts seem to break very easily. Especially minifigures. Hands, arms and "hips" deteriorate quickly. They crack slightly, become loose, etc.
• ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  2014? What's new since then? Fairly common knowledge that Lego basically saved the company and earned a ton of new money by focusing on branded sets and marketing-tie-ins etc, which was a change from the generic box of colored pieces and more independent-creativity-encouraging approach many of us grew up with. But that ship sailed so long ago and they made so much money, it isn't gonna stop any time soon.
• donretag 5y ago
  From the Simpsons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcyva_ltKug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcyva_ltKug
• Waterluvian 5y ago
  I agree with some of this. But also, my mostly complete Ice Planet set has been my singularly most cherished toy ever. I still have it today. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with well structured sets with instructions. As long as they use enough standard pieces to be able to mutate.
• markhelo 5y ago
  I don't remember her name but I once met an experienced market researcher about 10 years ago who worked for Lego in the 80's and 90's to study their users and figure out how to grow the company. She basically went on to explain the complete strategy that you still see them executing. Lego identified that at the core, there are 4 different needs. 1. Kids who like to imagine and create characters on their own and build Legos they can play with. This is typically at an early age. Hence the generic sets around trains, cars, dollhouses, etc. 2. Kids who love their favorite characters and play with them - hence Lego did partnerships with Marvel, StarWars, Disney, etc. 3. Kids who like to display their work with pride, build it once and never touch it again - hence the architecture series. 4. Kids who like to build and rebuild different things from the same set - hence Lego technic. She used Kids to mean not just by age but anyone who is a kid at heart :) After hearing it, I can't unsee it in a Lego store and am always amazed at the genius of doing market research. We have glorified these things in startups, but when done properly it helps any company.
• lukaszkups 5y ago
  Blacktron, Space Police II, Spyrius and my beloved Ice Planet 2002 was the greatest series of all time. While all of them were set in space theme, there was literally no chance you could mistake one with another!