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.
I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box, and built my own things later.
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.
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).
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.
But I really have no idea. It was a long time ago.
So these commend ridiculous prices for small pieces of plastic (about 8 euros or so last I checked).
Of course if you had a kilo of them the price would crater :)
Lego started pulling back from that a long time ago because they were too expensive.
They had a leadership change in 2004, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp came in and one of the first things he did was halve the number of different parts.
Personally I don't feel like this narrative about a substantial shift in Lego sets fits with reality. To me it feel like people conflates it with the rise of licensed sets.
6259: Broadside's Brig [https://brickset.com/sets/6259-1/Broadside-s-Brig]
For what was a very small and cheap set at the time, you are getting 3 minifigs and a small building on a baseplate. The bulk of the parts are yellow- and white-coloured bricks for walls and architectural elements. There is a specialised yellow-coloured edge panel with a red brick texture, but it plays very nicely with the rest of the parts architecturally. You can easily combine this set with the bigger forts and harbours. The colours are compatible, the parts are compatible.
This is not certainly the case with modern Lego sets.
Weird ski bricks, seethrou chain saw, antenna, big arrowshaped structural piece, etc.
I'm not surprised the one you linked is from 91. Noone is disputing that the complexity rose from the 80s. But the complexity we are seeing now is not a new thing. It started in the 90s.
... I don't think that era was especially complex, though, and in fact when I think about the worst sets from that era they were ones that were built with like half a dozen huge pieces for the bulk of the structure (there was some kind of Ice Base from that same series you linked that stands out, in particular).
Complex is the modern sets. Fiddly, even. Look at the size of a finished largish modern set (for kids, not one of the adult stick-it-on-a-shelf models), and its part count, and look at similar-sized sets from the 80s through, I dunno, maybe '95, and see what their part count was. The modern sets have so many itty bitty pieces. 500-something piece sets used to be really big when assembled.
They introduced special parts at the height of popularity and money success. Simplified when they had money issues - simple parts are cheaper to manufacture. Now that they are popular again, they are having more special parts again, but still less then used to be.
“Most” doesn’t feel right to me - my son’s mostly had City sets and they’re all repurposable, buildings use large flat pieces with configurable roads so it’s not quite as big but also allows more combinations than “large square”, etc. There are definitely specialty pieces but I’m skeptical that they’re that much more common given all of the pieces I had as a kid which were pretty specialized, too.
I've been doing more of this recently as I picked up some knock off mech based lego sets and adding more arms/building them more weapons/other things is fun way to make them look better.
In a box?!!
Our kids store piles of bricks on more or less every horizontal surface in their rooms.
> the elaborate sets
Our kids will always build each elaborate set once, according to the instructions, wait a day or three, then it's fair game to be cannibalized for their latest homespun supermegagiga-jet, -spaceship, -car or -house.
My mother wasn't too happy to step on the bricks, so I had to put them in a box.