Lego Goes Back to the Basics: Building Blocks

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Slashdot recently covered Lego's plan to stop producing its Mindstorms line in response to the Danish company's worst financial loss in history. While the original article linked focused primarily on Lego's plans to cease production on various toy lines, Yahoo News now has a follow-up article that looks in greater detail at Lego's plan for the future. 'We are returning to Lego's former concept,' says Lego owner and president Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. 'We're going to focus on building bricks as our main product, concentrating on little kids' eagerness to assemble.' Kristiansen goes on to blame the company's financial woes on its attempt to follow trends rather than focusing on its more traditional products. In turn, the company's plan for 2004 will include a renewed marketing push for Lego bricks as opposed to licensed products like the Harry Potter and Star Wars lines. Toy researcher Joern Martin Steenhold also notes the following in the article: 'All research, including my own, shows that computer games and other electronic games take up only 20 to 30 percent of children's play time. Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?"

Comments

First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

I always preffered unabashed Lego sets.

Having 100 of each was great. The sets with instructions were fun, but it really was more enjoyable to be creative. That's what we should getting children to do anyways.

Re:First Post

[bigman2003]

Lego could probably be a very profitable company for a long, long time. All they need to do is sell plastic blocks (which they price very high). Their move of getting rid of the electronics, tie-ins, etc is a good one. I wonder if they will dump the theme parks too.

20 years ago, someone at Lego thought that they should be a huge powerhouse company, with their hands in everything. Why not just be a medium sized company, making a few million dollars of profit every year with your core business?

Walgreens pharmacy did a similar thing. It seemed like suddenly every single corner had a Walgreens on it- everywhere you looked, another frickin Walgreens. Now, craploads of them have gone out of business, and the corner is left with a VERY cheap building. They didn't do themselves, or anyone else any good by over-expanding. (My old neighborhood had an awesome coffee shop that leased a corner building. Eventually, the landlord sold the corner lot, the coffee shop went out of business, and nice shiny new Walgreens was built. 2 years later, it is an empty building, where once my favorite coffee shop, with a fireplace even, stood.)

What does that have to do with Legos? Over expansion- the urge to be big, instead of concentrating on what works for you.

Re:First Post

[jedidiah]

Bullsh*t. Lego has to compete with all of it's little rivals that can now make perfectly compatable Lego knockoffs. Lego has always been the premium brand. It's little wonder that their sales would suffer during an economic slump when the dollar is weak. Blaming their current losses on current management is rather simpleminded.

They need to continue to differentiate themselves from a sea of knockoff artists that can clone any simplistic kit Lego makes.

I was actually looking forward to buying my son some of the more interesting modern Lego sets available these days. If they gut their line, I certainly won't be buying. There really wouldn't be a point.

Re:First Post

[Afrosheen]

When I was really young, around 9 or 10, I actually wrote a letter to Lego, begging them for a double-sided Lego brick. Either double-male or double-female, I drew pictures and everything. Lego, in their infinite wisdom, wrote back a few months later with some legalese bullshit about how they can't accept idea submissions from outside sources, particularly not children.

This was nearly 20 years ago. I think they should've taken my advice instead of doing Star Wars co-marketing.

Re:First Post

[bfields]

I spent hours working with the 'Technics'(sp?) sets they used to sell. These differed from the regular legos in that they came with a bunch of various sized gears, universal joints, steering knuckles, etc. The normal solid bricks have holes through which shafts may be run. I spent many many hours learning about gears, mechanical advantage, backlash, torque (I often wished for some metal versions of the plastic gears and shafts for high-load areas) and many other concepts.

I loved those things. In high school at one point we had a clock-designing project that I prototyped with the lego technics stuff; no hands or anything, just weight-driven thing with a primitive escapement and a big bar that swung back and forth to do the same job as a pendulum, all made out of lego.

That's the sort of thing lego was great for--you could have a good time building the (very clever) models from the instructions, but then you could also go do crazy things of your own. I hope kids are still playing with those things for many years. Except for being a bit pointy, they were the perfect toy--fun in the best possible way, because you could always do more with them.

--Bruce Fields

Re:First Post

[whittrash]

At Christmas I went through Target and checked out the Lego selection. It was pathetic. The legos I really wanted to see were Iraq legos, with Saddam in a Spider hole, Hummers, tanks, 4th Infantry Division Bradley Fighting vehicles, a prison and barracks, that would be cool. There were no space legos, no pirate legos, no medieval legos, no modern day legos (helicopter, ambulance, race car etc.). All they had were stupid NBA, Harry Potter, Star Wars and some useless NASA rockets and a bunch of crap. I didn't even see the bucket of plain legos which is my favorite. I have never, ever bought legos which were of a branded product (like Harry Potter or NBA), that isn't the point of Legos (Although the NBA arena they sell would make a very good deathmatch arena for wily humans vs. the alien robots or humans infected with dinasaur DNA). Legos are only useful when you can build an asteroid base with a small army of space pirates (who have a black flagged pirate space ship complete with sails) and they wage war with the Space Patrol and space miner Bill and his dump truck crew over a mining facility which always gets destroyed in a massive conflagration and has to be rebuilt in a new configuration. You can't do that with a Shaq lego set, all the imagination is cut off. They don't sell any of the right parts for a time machine anymore. And how am I supposed to build a fusion generator with my niece and nephew that overloads blowing up half the planet with the gimpy legos they sell now. No wonder they are losing cash.

I still play with my Lego :)

[grub]

Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?

I'm 38 and still monkey with Lego. When I was sick at home for a few days I had a little contest running with myself. I had built a small Lego "bridge" that could span a piece of legal paper lengthwise (14") then would place a glass of water on it. If the bridge didn't hold then I had water to clean up. If the bridge held for 5 minutes I'd tear it down then 're-engineer' it with less pieces than before. All the regular bricks, no cheating with the longer pieces. :)

When you're sick a bit of a mental challenge helps you forget the illness. (I was doing this with my Lego blocks from 30+ years ago but I have a lot of Mindstorms stuff too, it's leet)

Re:I still play with my Lego :)

[bconway]

Zero to seven? What about the Slashdot crowd?

I'd say that pretty much covers the maturity level of the posters here.

Re:I still play with my Lego :)

[uberdave]

My brother's company had a lego tower building contest. His team won because they used an unorthodox strategy. All the other teams used the lego blocks in the standard orientation (bumps up, holes down). His team set the blocks on their side (bumps right, holes left), trading off a certain amount of lateral stability for greater gains in height. Perhaps you could use the same strategy in your bridge building?

Re:I still play with my Lego :)

[MullerMn]

much to the wife's annoyance (that I'm taking up closet space)

Perhaps it's time to come out the closet? I'm sure your wife will understand.

what I would like to see

[mpost4]

is a return to the way legos were sold in the 80's, not in sets, yes there were those, but you could also just get a generic set. I have not see a generic set in the stores around here, they all are some set based on some movie game or some thing, but no generic set.

Re:what I would like to see

[TopShelf]

The great thing about doing this (going back to generic set sales) for Lego is that it drastically reduces their costs while also directing focus back where it belongs - on the open-ended nature of the toy. Instead of directing a kid to build Hogwarts or something, let them build whatever their imagination comes up with...

Re:what I would like to see

[broller]

They come in buckets now. They were called Freestyle sets throughout the 90's, but I'm not sure what the series name is now. Check your local Lego aisle for buckets full of windows, bricks, etc.

If it's individual kinds of parts in bulk you want, shop.lego.com still sells the service packs that they've always sold through the Shop At Home catalog, as well as the rest of their product line.

For single special parts, or any other sort of non-set purchase, BrickLink is a great resource. That's where the resellers break down the sets they buy from stores and sell the parts individually. If you want 300 wigets in blue, bricklink is the best way to find them.

Re:what I would like to see

[tuffy]

The great thing about doing this (going back to generic set sales) for Lego is that it drastically reduces their costs while also directing focus back where it belongs - on the open-ended nature of the toy. Instead of directing a kid to build Hogwarts or something, let them build whatever their imagination comes up with...

If the sets were built with generic pieces, a kid could build Hogwarts from the directions. Then, he could tear it down and build a bunch of completely different things that look nothing like the picture on the box. The first yellow castle set I got back in the late 70s was like this - packed with plenty of plain pieces and only a handful of specialized ones.

Then, as early as the mid-80s, Lego started using specialized "castle wall" pieces that weren't useful for anything other than assembling medieval-looking buildings. It was a downward trend, though I didn't realize it at the time.

Re:what I would like to see

[damian]

In Cologne Germany they have a lego shop where you can fill up cups of different sizes with lego blocks from a good selection and than pay by cup size. Similar to some sweet store.

Re:what I would like to see

[DenOfEarth]

I remember getting a lego grey castle set that I rather liked. The castle wall piece weren't too bad, as they simply acted as a window frame kind of piece that added a bit to the castle, yet they remained somewhat generic enough in that you could build a wall around it with generic lego brick pieces. The castle gates were also made with generic pieces too, if I remember correctly, so they were good.

I saw my cousin got a 'bionicle' lego set for christmas this year, and it was ridiculous. I don't think there were more than a hundred pieces, and no more than a handful of them could be connected to something other than the piece they were supposed to be connected to on the picture on the box. The special piece thing has definitely gone way too far (even though the last lego set I got: a pirate ship, looked pretty damn impressive when it was all put together).

FIRST Lego League?

[GabrielF]

I wonder how this will effect FIRST Lego League, the international robotics competition for middle-schoolers. FLL is a great program from Dean Kamen and the same people who run the FIRST Robotics Competition.

Great news for parents and children

[addie]

A corporation moving back toward imagination and away from limiting corporate tie-ins, don't see too much flowing in that direction these days. The "themed" Lego sets were the worst thing to happen to toys in my lifetime.

I'm beginning to have faith that I may be able to buy new Lego for my future children, as opposed to having them play with my mess of a collection.

Re:Great news for parents and children

[palutke]

A corporation moving back toward imagination and away from limiting corporate tie-ins, don't see too much flowing in that direction these days.

I wonder how much of their decision is based on the licensing fees that Lucas, etc. were charging. I can easily see them saying "Your license isn't bringing enough sales to justify the money you want for it. Thanks, but no thanks.

"What about the Slashdot Crowd?"

[duffbeer703]

The problem with the Slashdot crowd is that not as many /.'ers play with legos and one might think. Most of us have jobs and lives that prevent us from playing with cool toys.

On the other hand, Lego's problems lay deeper than a bloated product line. Lego toys are way, way too expensive. Even when I was a little kid twenty years ago, my parents bought me high quality knockoffs at Sears for like 1/3 the cost of Legos. I imagine that it's worse today.

Re:"What about the Slashdot Crowd?"

[Tassach]

The great part about parenthood is that "having a life" means that you spend time with the kids. Having kids means that you can go out and blow a wad of money on toys and not feel guilty about it. My munchkin is still a little young for lego, but when he's a little older you can bet that he & I are going to be spending many hours playing legos together.

Re:"What about the Slashdot Crowd?"

[digitalsushi]

LEGO are definitely expensive, but you do have to admit they last forever. Some of my LEGO men have been through the dog on countless adventures, and besides a dynamic ethnicity, have always been there at the end. A good bath and they're always back to their cheery Danish Yellow selves.

Re:"What about the Slashdot Crowd?"

[ShadyG]

Don't know how young your munchkin is, but my 2yo daughter is currently helping me build the meter-long Death Star. I pick out one example of a piece of which I need 34 and tell her to find 33 more of them. She really digs it. It helps with her fine motor skills (handling the small pieces), fine shape distinctions (1x1 plate with a loop at the end is different from a 1x1 plate without), and counting. And when we finish a page of building, she cheers.

It may take 10x as long as doing it myself, but who cares? That just means more time playing with Legos!

Mental Age

[JohnGrahamCumming]

> Boys play with traditional toys up until the age
> of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age
> range that Lego has its niche.' Zero to seven?
> What about the Slashdot crowd?

Perhaps he was talking mental age? :-)

Seriously though a key trait of the hacker mindset is, I think, playfulness. That shows up in the way hackers mess around with language and Lego. And that playfulness is a key aspect of learning. How many times have you hacked something together "just for the fun of it": in reality half the fun was that you were learning.

The good news is that Lego is going back to the bricks. Great news Lego, that's just what we all needed!

John.

Stupid LEGO pieces

[nuggz]

The problem with LEGO is the stupid pieces.
Grab a random $20 kit at a store, it's full of special pieces with no real use.
What happened to actual blocks? you get only a few if any in the average kit.

I was going to buy lego for some children, until I realized I would need a moderate fortune to give them a decent assortment of basic pieces.

Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen

[p4ul13]

He is soon to be a guest on Krusty's Komedy Klassic.

Concentrations spans

[vpscolo]

One thing lego always helped me do was learn to conentrate. I could spend hours just doing one thing. Kids now days seem to spend 5 minute son something then move on

As the old saying goes

"I'm sure my concentration span is...ooh look shiny thing"

Rus

I want basic bricks

[WillAdams]

It'd be nice if they were more affordable though (this is where that nasty global economy / foreign currency things comes into play :(

Actually, I've been kind of surprised that Lego hasn't hit upon the idea of marketing kits directly to grown-ups, say a line of desk accessories (the pens struck me as lame).

When I got a Fujitsu Point 510 pen slate, I didn't bother to get a stand---thought about making one out of wood, but instead chose to use my old Legos (I've since added a pen holder and a stand for a CD-RW drive to lift it up behind the Fujitsu Stylistic I did purchase a stand for (was running low on Legos)).

Pictures of the Point 510 and stand should be here:

http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPI C_ ID=7109

William

Back to the basics? Good...

[John_Booty]

I like the "back to the basics" idea. Today's Lego sets look way too specialized to me- too many specialized pieces, not enough basic Lego bricks- so there's a lot less creative potential. They also look way too expensive.

I think that selling basic Lego sets again is a nice potential return to the things I liked about Legos as a kid in the early 80's. It would be nice if they could sell the basic sets in addition to the fancier licsensed sets and the advanced products like Mindstorms instead of canning those products entirely, but all in all I like this move.

Good!

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

Legos were much better when they were simply blocks and YOUR IMAGINATION was what mattered. I've watched my little brothers put together newer lego sets where most of the pieces are designed to fit together in ONE SPECIFIC WAY. Everything is already planned out, and you are supposed to follow the directions (like a some-assembly-required toy).

I'm all for plain old blocks again. And I wouldn't be surprised if that leads to higher revenues again.

what about the girls?

[tuxette]

Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.'

What about girls? (And there's supposed to be ingrained gender equality in Denmark hmmmf!)

OK, the girls that play with Legos and stuff like that might get shunned by the the silly girls who play with dolls and maybe some parents want their little girls to wear frilly dresses and play with dolls and girlie stuff but 1) it was always more fun to play with the boys, and 2) who says you can't make a tea party set with lego blocks??

Finally

[Remlik]

This makes me very happy to hear. I'm 25 and my favorite lego series was the "Model Team" with the Semi trucks, jeeps, vans, helicopters and generally cool, LARGE fully functional models of real life vehicles.

I recently rebuilt my model team semi and it now rests proudly on my desk. Right now they have a very nice lego Shuttle in the stores for $50 bucks (same price as most of the model team models back in the day, and even today on ebay)that I've been trying to convince my wife we need...hehe

Its really disapointing to go to the store and see Soccer, Harry Potter, and Star Wars sets with little more than 20 pieces and some look alike action figures. Give the kids somthing that will take them a few hours to build and leave them enough blocks to construct something different if they should choose.

Just this weekend I noticed some new sets out called "design sets" that were of normal everyday objects (one was a pontoon plane) and each set is capable of being at least 3 different things. (I assume they have docs inside which show how to convert as well..at least the last technic model I bought did)

This is the lego I remember and love, and I think more parents would rather buy somthing that can be more than just a scene from SW or HP.

Re:What about us?

[dnahelix]

You're not grown, you're just OLD .

Re:Call me blasphemous, perhaps

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

Two more:

Capsela - Cool plastic spheres with gears and motors inside them and various wheels and such to attach. The coolest part was that they had float attachments so you could make boats. I made some of these into a robot for a final class project just recently.

Old School Erector Sets - these things are valuable collectors items now. I seem to remember the instructions giving you basic structural engineering tips. The motor they had was badass.

Tim

Bionicle was sorta cool.

[waxmop]

I bought a few of the bionicles because they had some new pieces like ball-and-socket joints and lots of gears. The problem was that until you accumulate several kits, you're pretty limited. The typical kits has enough to build exactly one freaky alien warrior: two arms, two legs, a trunk, and a head. There's just not that much you can do when the pieces are so specialized.

After getting several kits, though, then I could come up with more designs, like centipede monsters, etc, but I still felt constrained by how specialized the pieces were. It's hard to figure out an alternate use for the little brain piece that only connects with one other piece, for example The ball-socket joints and the gears were a nice addition though.

Anyway, I'm glad to see legos returning to the original free-form ideal rather than becoming a glorified action-figure maker.

Reminds me of an old joke

[ThinWhiteDuke]

Do you know the difference between a clitoris and a Lego brick?

If you don't, keep playing with Lego.

Re:Walgreens overpopulation

[pantycrickets]

You could throw a rock from any one of the drugstores and hit any of the other ones. I am sure there is some reason for this, but I have yet to be told what it is.

Americans are drug addicts?

Buckets!! Empty buckets!

[samjam]

I bought an giant tub of lego, >2000 bits in it.

It was mostly empty and most of the bits were one or two square size!!

I was very angry!

New lego in the UK costs about 100 GBP per kilo.

Lego on ebay costs 10 GBP per kilo.

For the summer I bought 15 Kilo of lego, enough for 5 children to play with (no, I dont have 5 children.)

I bought it from ebay!

Sam

Mindstorms: RCX, motors and sensors

[kherr]

Mindstorms is all about three things: RCXes, motors and sensors. The RCX is the "brain" that you program. It has inputs and outputs.

You want to buy as many Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention Systems as you can. Each RIS kit comes with an RCX, two motors and various sensors. The kit also includes plenty of wheels, axles and generic blocks for building just about anything. It's a good bargain. I own two kits and probably need more now that they'll be discontinued.

The accessory kits have been somewhat of a disappointment for me, but it is how you get some different sensors. You can order discrete parts directly from Lego but you end up paying a lot.

Lego's importance cannot be overstated.

[smackdotcom]

Lego was by far my favourite toy growing up. Indeed, I played with the stuff so much that I am convinced that it has affected my thinking patterns, and in good ways. My visual-spatial sense is excellent, and my mind is forever trying to break down problems into modular pieces; or, seeing a collection of modular components, trying to figure out intriguing ways to assemble them into a larger system. In short, ladies and gentlemen, I think in Lego.

That said, I hope that the Lego company goes about this the right way. The things I always wanted as a youngster were more hinges and other such articulated pieces in order to build things like spacecraft and vehicles with moving parts; doors and hatches that open, sensors that swivel, and so forth. Lego's strengths were always in the design of clever models that most of us would build at least once. You could learn some neat tricks by understanding how the model designers accomplished a particular effect using a small number of bricks. I agree with posters to a previous Lego story who criticized the overabundance of specialized pieces (anathema to the creative Lego builder) and the rather exorbitant prices of Lego kits.

Perhaps Lego has decided that its future is no longer in robotics, but computers can play a role in its revival. Embrace the Internet! As so many slashdotters will attest, there are large numbers of people for whom Lego remains a unique creative outlet. Work to bring them together through the Net, and offer to sell them what they want through that same channel. More standardized, well-thought-out basic bricks, offered with the promise of volume discounts through Internet purchases. Parents who still enjoy Lego and can get access to their favourite toy in bulk and share their love of creating with a community of fellow builders will have kids who will get an early taste of the joys of building with little plastic blocks, and will thus pass on the hobby to the next generation.

What about girls?

[Phronesis]

Boys play with traditional toys up until the age of eight or 10, and it is in the zero to seven age range that Lego has its niche.

I am constantly frustrated when I try to buy Legos for my daughter. She loves building with Legos, but is not really interested in the kind of macho directions Lego has been going (fighting themes). Clikits does not fit the bill, and it's almost impossible to find a store that carries Belville sets.

Maybe if Lego would try harder and with more imagination to reach the other 50% of the zero-to-seven set, they's make more money.

Re:Nth Post

[Afrosheen]

Not to mention your parents 'finding' the lost Legos in the middle of the night walking through your house. You'd definitely hear about it in the morning.

It's surprising how painful a little brick of plastic can be when it's jamming into your foot at 3am.

Gender-neutral play

[jmb-d]

I've got 2 test subjects, er, 21-month-old boy/girl twins at home, and we allow them to play with whatever toys they want to.

Generally, they both play with (and share) the Duplo blocks (Legos are still a choking hazard), the Matchbox cars, the Mr. (and Mrs.) Potato Head, the Brio trains, my bass amp, and so on. There are also baby dolls (boy/girl twins, like them), various stuffed critters, and the Little Tykes kitchen our friends gave them. And books -- tons of 'em. Boynton, Little Golden Books, DK, Shel Silverstein poetry, Dr. Seuss, Pooh (AA Milne, not the Disney-fied crap), etc. They sometimes insist on taking a book to bed with them at nap time...

Does my son play with the trains more than the kitchen? Seems like it to me.

Does my daughter play more with the baby dolls? Again, seems like it to me.

Do we "direct" them in their play, shooing them away from any particular toy or "suggesting" to them to play with something else instead?

Absolutely not.

Lower prices

[Sandman1971]

What Lego needs to do is lower their prices. Their prices are just ludicrous! 80-120$ Can for a box of Legos? Lower the price to 20-30$ and people will buy.

Specialized pieces inspire MORE creativity

[misuba]

Think about it: it's easy to come up with multiple uses for a simple brick. Faced with the brown log-cabin wall pieces from the old Western-themed sets, well, what would you do then? A friend of mine was puzzling over that, and finally came up with a scale model of his old, ugly foam-and-corduroy couch (with a skeleton of Technic pieces). When you _do_ come up with alternate uses for highly specialized pieces, the results are really dazzling.

As long as I'm being heretical, I'll say that the Star Wars sets are the best things that happened to Lego in ten years. Those models are much higher quality and piece count than a lot of what came before, they got lots of geeks like me involved in Lego for the first time in their adult lives, and many of the "specialized" pieces created just for Star Wars sets turn out to be very versatile and beautiful. (Printed designs on pieces have got to go, though, as does the entire ugly-as-sin Harry Potter line.)