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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".
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.
There are a few sites out there that still have them. It will cost you probably about 50-80 bucks each. The BIG one probably 200 or more. http://www.bricklink.com/index.asp
But for free there is
http://www.ldraw.org/
and
http://www.peeron.com/
I have been having so much fun with this these programs recreating virtual lego sets and I dont have to DIG through my massive box of em. Plus the programs are more cad like (and have more pieces) then the offical lego editor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe this one:
http://guide.lugnet.com/set/420_1 (US version)
Or less likely:
http://guide.lugnet.com/set/600_2 (also US version)
Buy here:
http://www.bricklink.com/search.asp?itemID=6270
etc.
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
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.
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
Awesome.
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
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.
.
one of those flat, gray, 1-by-2's from the little red ambulance. I'm missing one.
Evil is the money of root.
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
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.
Why should I? What do you think I am, the government?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.