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Lego Secret Vault Contains All Sets In History
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo has an exclusive video and feature of one of the most heavily guarded secrets in Lego: the security vault where they store all the Lego sets ever created, new in their boxes. 4,720 sets from 1953 to 2008. Really amazing stuff and a trip down memory lane to every person who has played with the magic bricks. All combined, the collection must be worth millions, not only because of the collector value, but also because Lego uses it as a safeguard in copyright and patent cases."
FTFS
but also because Lego uses it as a safeguard in copyright and patent cases This is why this is no surprise to me. I believe that pretty much every manufacturer does this.Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
They would have totally gotten bonus points in my book if the vault and locking mechanism were actually made of Legos. It's totally doable (people have made far bigger things out of Legos), but probably insecure if you can just cut through the Legos with a Sawz-All. Still, it would have been nice if they'd made it LOOK like it were made of Legos. The Lego signs are a nice touch along those lines.
It looks Impenetrable!
Read my Very Short "Stories"
That's a 928 Galaxy Space Explorer, too bad it isn't in the original shrink wrap....
I like how each of the storage isles are compressed against each other initially and can then be opened with a crank.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
Wish they still sold the X-Wing and Tie-Fighter models.
When I first read it, I assumed it was going to be a data store of all possible combinations of every Lego block ever created so that all possible designs were prior art and their property.
Lego needs to work on this.
Oh man, the Galaxy Explorer was the best! Seems like after the space sets, all the pieces started getting to specialized. Giant plates that could hardly be used to make anything other than what the instructions said.
I remember having dozens of little bins full of the hinge pieces, light bulb looking things, and space man helmets.
Good times.
Now I have to go change my pants. Thanks Slashdot.
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
That was fun to watch.
I never followed any of the Lego instructions, though. So while I owned many of those sets, I never built any of those things.
Was there anybody else who would just dump open the packages, mix it in with all your other pieces, and build random crap...like flying boats that deploy ninjas?
I've been in several organizations from universities to oil companies where large amounts of data have been lost due to system conversions, downsizings and geographic moves. I find it remarkable if a company can save several decades of history.
By far, the Auto Chassis. Rack and pinion steering, v-4 motor with moving pistons, 3-speed gear box, fully independent front and rear suspension, oh and adjustable seats. Was an awesome kit to put together.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
When I was a kid, LEGO decided to license out their manufacture to a Samsonite factory in Loveland, Colorado (right next door to the Hewlett Packard facility that was the first place HP had outsourced from its birth in Silicon Valley, as it happens.) The factory also made luggage and kids' bikes. It was cool because up until 2006 it still looked like it had been made of LEGO bricks: the windows were 2x4 clear bricks on-end, 12 feet high. They made all sorts of weird LEGO stuff, and I wonder sometimes if it was all official -- the injection molding dies came straight from Denmark, and were very, very carefully accounted for, but the plant also built other unusual LEGO sets like big crude-looking gears that only sort of meshed with the standard LEGO bricks.
My childhood was filled with disappointment because no matter how many LEGO kits I managed to get, some of my friends, whose parents worked at the plant, had trash-bags full of floor sweepings and could make playhouses we could crawl into with their bricks. (Including a lot of weird off-colors and bricks that weren't shaped quite right.) The local library had, and probably still has, several LEGO buildings the size of cars, beautifully designed and put together. I was upset that they were glued together, making all those parts worthless. Okay, I'm still upset by that.
Anyway. I've just always wondered if the rumors were true and the little Colorado plant did create some graymarket LEGO kits that Billund doesn't have. LEGO yanked their license after only a few years because they were doing a poor job, but maybe, just maybe, I have a couple LEGO pieces that aren't represented in that vault in Billund.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
now that there is a video of it. Do you think they just put the word secret in the title to get more clicks?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
The first toy I can remember was a small Lego police car set. I think it was comprised of a black "plane", two opaque, slanted pieces, two sets of wheels, and I believe it was labeled as police car because the pieces were black and white. I have never ever ever forgotten how much fun I had, and I can still see my parents now, giving it to me, in a little white box. I think I was maybe, maybe, 4 years old.
It's really nice to know that there is a place that has that exact set, and maybe, if I'm really lucky, I'll be able to see it again.
Remember journalists! The first rule of journalism is "Nobody cares about you and your life. If you are really lucky, they might just be interested in your subject, but they certainly aren't interested in you!"
Man, that big yellow castle really makes the old memories rush back. That one was my first and favorite Lego set. Nice to see it again. I remember modernizing my castle with some computer unit pieces borrowed from a space set.
Building instructions from 1958 to 2007 on this site:
http://www.hccamsterdam.nl/brickfactory/year/index.htm
My favorite part was where they showed the bodies of the eBay Power Sellers that had been caught trying to tunnel in. They hand them upside down on big plastic stakes outside (the original Lego Vlad The Impaler kits are very scarce, but they work great).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The vault is hardly a secret if you're an avid Lego fan. For additional pictures and some fairly interesting discussion about unreleased sets, etc., check out this discussion (from 4 years ago):
http://news.lugnet.com/general/?n=47132
(please don't kill Lugnet or Brickshelf, /.!)
The Duplo vault will be built in future upon the foundations of the Lego vault. To save construction costs the engineers designed all of the Duplo vaults' HVAC, electrical and security systems to be easily integrated once placed on top of the existing building. Plans were changed from the origional, reverse design upon discovery that building the Lego facilities upon the Duplo vault would not integrate well structurally.
Okay, that's it. We're breaking in. All The Italian Job (1969 version). Everyone all driving little Lego Moonbuggies. Who's with me?
Sure you can. They even come in fruity flavors.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
Sounds like a good target for an Oceans/Heist movie. Something actually worth stealing...
What Lego has here is more the exception to the rule.
And on a separate note, am I the only one here horrified to see these people handling these boxes with their bare hands. For crying out loud, I hope they at least made that guy wash his hands first before letting him finger everything up.
Sheesh.
and the lost Shrine of TooMuchLego.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Oh God, the Galaxy Explorer and the rocket were my favorite sets when I was a kid... Feels weird to see them presented like that.
They make it look like they were recovered from under Stonehenge or the Pyramids.
I feel old.
"I don't particularly like". If by this country he means Denmark then OH BOY ... is this guy fastidious or what?! Denmark has got one of the highest friggen living standards in the world!
Du kan glomma dina ensama stunder, du kan lita paa teknikens under - Wilmer X
"Lego Secret Vault Contains All Sets In History"
Do I smell a National Treasure 3?
For Christmas in 1990, my dad bought me the Legoland pirate ship (#6285), as shown in the video, and a few other pirate sets. I put them together immediately and played with them for hours on end.
My dad died suddenly in early 1991. Those lego sets were the last thing he ever gave me.
Seeing that original box on the video made me feel 10 years old all over again. Thanks Gizmodo & Slashdot.
He's not a journalist, he's a blogger. For bloggers it is all about them.
I imagine it must be rare, but does someone want to put some context on it? How rare is it? How valuable is it?
One of my friends wrote a fan letter to the company when he was very young, basically just a "I really love Legos, they're my favorite toy, I like building castles and spaceships!". Something like that.
The response he got was a brief reply along the lines of: "Please refer to our product as Lego-brand building blocks." I don't know the exact wording, but it was a rather terse trademark defense letter.
I understand you have to defend your trademark to keep it, but it's one of those sour feelings that he's remembered ever since.
My bro had the castle they've showed briefly :D
My Windows is NOT slow, it's special!
That was the entire point of the earlier lego sets, and why so many of the newer sets are so crappy. If you buy a lego set where you snap seven pieces together to make Darth Maul's speeder bike, all you have is a crappy Star Wars (TM) toy. Legos are imagination toys.
man we were so broke, we just had a bucket with a bunch of standard bricks. The things you could do with the regular 4x2s.
+1 fascinating trivia. How sure can they be that it's a 47 digit number when it will take them so many years to figure out which 47 digit number it is?
... and it's up here on /.? Wow.
Geraldo opened the "secret vault". There was nothing in there except a few old toy store receipts.
'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
Mr Slacker, you have made me unbelievably happy. The first one was it, as soon as I saw it, I remembered the whole thing, standing there, being given this by my folks. For a split second, I was 4 years old and it was like the happiest moment of my life, again.
Thank you Thank you Thank you.
You're one of those people that never played with his toys but kept them in the original box for collector's value, right?
I never got that idea. It's a toy. Play with it! That's what it was made for. Yes, that means they ain't in "mint" condition after a while, but they gave me a lot of fun and very fond memories. No money in the world could compensate that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually, even though LEGO famously patented the basic stud-and-tube brick design decades ago, the company has filed for numerous patents since then on all sorts of things.
You can view them on Google's Patent Search. Many are filed by INTERLEGO AG of Switzerland.
http://www.google.com/patents?q=interlego&btnG=Search+Patents
Among other things, LEGO has patented the track and car designs from its monorail system, a "brick vacuum" for picking up bricks, and a linear actuator system that is going to be used in the 2008 LEGO Technic sets released this fall.
20 years ago i threw a quarter into a wishing fountain and wished i had every lego set ever made.
it looks like they've finally finished collecting them all together for me and are readying to hand them over.
wishes do come true.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
When will the fan bois start fighting over which bricks are better.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
She says "Nearly all lego products"...
This implies there are some missing. Hmmm...I wonder what they are missing....
...the scene where Carell's character gets all bent about NOT OPENING THE ORIGINAL PACKAGING!
So if they open up an old box of Legos, does that make it less valuable in a court case? :D
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
To a collector, the collection is the fun, and the fond memories are inside those mint-condition original boxes. That row of original Star Wars figurines in their pristine presentation boxes are a point of pride and a symbol of an achievement.
I'm with you on this one, and I smashed the shit out of a lot of what would probably have been very valuable collector's items in my youth, all in the name of fun, but I do understand the collectors' mindset.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
came flying out from the fire.
These are archival copies of things that may not exist in such a pristine state anywhere anymore. How the poster uses their own toys, particularly NOW as opposed to when they were a child, is irrelevant. I'd be willing to bet that you have, to others, a weird fetish or two yourself. All the interesting people do anyway.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
I recently went home to visit my Dad and found that he was cleaning out the house, ridding it of junk because his partner wanted it cleaned (quite justified). I was having a good riffle through the stuff they were going to throw out when I came across my two, 50 litre buckets of Lego. I very quickly put these in my car to take back to my house for 'archival purposes'.
I'll have kids fairly soon that will be of an age to start playing with these things. I'll be encouraging the play of Lego more than watching TV or playing computer/console games. Sure, computer games can teach you problem solving techniques, but so does Lego, as well as having tactile response.
.
Certainly not all of them. I'm certain that I have a set from a couple decades ago around here somewhere.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...it's full of stars!
A set of all sets in history? Impossible! :P
(OK, so I guess the vault itself is not built from Legos -- which just betrays an appaling lack of confidence and nerdiness on the part of the Lego company)
A word or two always makes all the difference. Like broadband speeds up to 8 megabits per second.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Stone Henge has interlocking blocks - ditto for Egyptian monuments. Most Lego patents are pure bull and expired already anyway. Anyone who wants to make interlocking blocks can do so.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Now it's just the Lego vault
"Most heavily guarded secret"...
"Gizmodo has an exclusive video and feature"
So how's the guarding of that secret going, guys?
In other news, Prince Charles role as Defender Of The Faith was changed to Defender Of The Faiths.
Fail.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
one of those flat, gray, 1-by-2's from the little red ambulance. I'm missing one.
Evil is the money of root.
But these sets aren't toys. They are archived specifically for preservation. Do you want to go down to the National Archives and start manhandling an original copy of the Constitution?
These aren't toys any longer; they are artifacts. If you're serious about keeping your artifacts around, you need to remember this.
I volunteer at the Computer History Museum, and they're very particular about this. Wearing white cotton gloves as you pick up an old Atari joystick may seem silly, but that's the rule. There's very little information about how long plastics will last, so keep your grubby little fingers off.
The United States of America: We mean well.
More to the point, the collector's fun is only possible because of everyone like you that played with the toys. It's a symbiotic relationship: If everyone collected, there'd be no scarcity!
Culture is more than commerce
So if they open up an old box of Legos, does that make it less valuable in a court case?
Yes. If it's unopened, that's more convincing proof that the weird shaped piece the suit is about really was in that set as it was shipped. If it's been opened then they might have slipped it in after the suit.
Actually I played with all of my toys quite a bit and some of them got destroyed in the process. That's not the point, and as others have already countered... These are not toys. This is an official corporate archive of products.
These are effectively one of a kind items for their intended purpose so you would think that extra care would be taken with them in this context.
The oils on human skin are quite destructive. Case in point, don't wash your hands for part of the day and then pick up any magazine and smudge your thumb across a page with black ink. The soy/vegetable based inks used in most printing will breakdown and smear from the contact. There is no repair for this kind of damage.
That's what a lot of people miss. Collectibles like Franklin Mint plates are never going to yield the increase in value that an item everybody owned, but most destroyed will yield. It's the fact that everybody had one, and now they don't that creates the huge demand and small supply that makes most collectibles valuable.
...a young Ferengi boy's head just exploded.
I loved those space sets, seeing them still in their packaging was simply amazing, but the best thing was..
I HAD THAT EXACT HELICOPTOR SET!!!
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
How I miss the general purpose technics sets. I haven't seen them at a store in years.
I could do more with a bunch of bricks, gears, axles, connectors, pulleys, rubber bands, and a couple of electric motors as a kid than I can even imagine now.
Every archaeological dig I go on at my parent's house I keep an eye out for old Lego component.
http://images.google.com/images?q=6980%20lego&hl=en
I wanted that thing since I first ever saw it in a catalogue, you could totally tell it was by far the most awesome battleship ever made.
I did have this baby http://www.brickset.com/detail.aspx?Set=6985-1 which was an awesome set (bloody heavy too) but it was clearly a science vessel and damnit if I didn't want 6980.
Oh the memories.
Coming soon to a theater near you,
Jason Statham in "The Lego Vault Job"
That's pretty much the point.
Every time I see some ad for this or that "collectible" riffraff, I wonder if some people ever got the idea of "valuable". Will some "coin" (which isn't even legal tender) ever gain in value? When there are like a million out there? And the original seller already has troubles getting rid of them since you see those ads for over a year before he finally sold them all?
I think you summed it up pretty well. A collectible that gains value is something everyone knows, everyone wants and only a handful have. Personally, I could see a can of old Bud being a better "collectible" than any of those plates you mentioned. It's something a lot of people remember from their youth, and maybe even have fond memories of. Well, if they remember anything of that time, that is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Star Wars figurines in their pristine presentation boxes are a point of pride and a symbol of an achievement
This is what I don't really get about collecting stuff like this. It' s not an achievement, in any sensible definition of the word. You just bought something that somebody else thought up, designed, got made, marketed and sold. So what? It's just another form of consumerism, and anything so-called "limited edition" is just a device marketers use to tap into this hoarder/collector mentality.
There are some things worth collecting, I've no doubt, but it's usually the "accidentally collectible" stuff that is infinitely more interesting, and to me that almost never includes mass-produced plastic moulded objects.
"No - no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful..."
Seriously, the wave of nostalgia hit me like a 2x4 across the back of the head. When they pulled out the "Main Street" set, which I got when it first came out and still have at age 34, I got a little verklempt.
~Philly
bear with us. some nerds grew up with these things.
...of Bob is worth!
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
...was a small town in central Wisconsin.
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
Forty two!
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
I didn't know what a railgun was at the time, but my Space Lego dudes fought entire battles with vehicle-mounted lego cannon-turrets.
The little ones used a couple small rubber bands and fired muzzle-loaded 1xN blocks. The late-model big ones involved breech-loading magazine-fed stacks of ball bearings, using enough big rubber bands to run right into the limits of my draw strength.
That deadly 'sha-CLACK!' became the most feared noise in the rec room. Fortunately, legos are resilient, and few of the actual pieces broke, although it was impressive as hell when an overstressed cannon imploded around the rubber bands.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
LEGO GEM Mint.
Or rather, didn't...
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Dunno if you guys have seen it but in Munich, around Christmas, there is a window in one of the department stores (Karstadt?), full of lifesize Lego figures--Vader, Yoda, Boba Fett, the musicians from Mos Eisley Cantina (IV), etc. Nice combo of things that are nostalgic to me :)
What you need are wealthy parents to buy you two of everything, so you can be both happy as a child and rich as an adult. But then, you'd probably end up as a spoiled brat, and would be bullied at school, so money can't buy you happiness.
Stick with happy.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
WTH, it's Lego. Why do you need a secret vault?
Who the hell is going to want to rob a vault of Lego sets?
I could possibly understand wanting them to be climate controlled, and behind lock and key, but only so they don't get misplaced.
Unless they're also storing $600 million in negotiable bearabonds.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That was the 8860 Auto Chassis.. I loved that one!
I used to make monster 4x4 trucks with turning radar dishes and all kinds of crazy stuff.
http://www.nd.edu/~lego/grp2/www/graphics/lego/8860.jpg
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Have you seen what Lego has been up to this decade in terms of web services? I just discovered this yesterday:
Lego Factory is a whole system where you can not only download a free app to build a virutal model with nearly the entire library of Lego pieces, but you can then make instructions and automatically order a set of the pieces required to build it in real life.
Amazing. Even something this close to where my mind was at age 10, and I still couldn't have dreamed of it.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Is there some sort of database of Lego projects where you simply enter x amount of y type of Lego parts and you can get a list of the things you can build? I still have my Technic instructions, but my Lego instructions are long gone and I'm sure I don't have all of the blocks I used to have, but I still have a lot left over.
Anybody know of something like this? It'd be fun.