Lego isn’t just for kids: the latest news for nostalgic adults and adult budgets

Donkey Kong has been around as long as Mario himself, but this August will be the first time he’s officially appeared in Lego form — on August 1st, the Danish toymaker is adding four Lego Donkey Kong sets to the ever-widening Lego Super Mario lineup.

They aren’t filled with ladders, hammers, and fireballs like the original arcade game, mind; these sets are straight out of Donkey Kong Country, with the gorilla’s relatives along for the ride.

Lego has made another fan toy dream come true: its new Sonic The Hedgehog sets actually let you send Sonic spinning through an entire miniature level.

This isn’t the first time Sonic has been recreated in Lego form — we got a picture-perfect recreation of Green Hill Zone in 2021 that’ll look great on a bookshelf and a tie-in for the Lego Dimensions video game in 2016. But if you want a playset like Lego’s Mario line, that’s just now happening for the very first time.

Nick Lever, video editor and Lego Masters Australia finalist, has recreated the original Nintendo Game Boy in bricks — and with such droolworthy depth that I hereby petition Lego to make it into an official set.

It’s just 364 pieces, only 115 different parts, most of them common enough you can find ‘em dirt cheap. Almost every recognizable facet of the Game Boy is represented, from the angled rice-grain Start / Select buttons to the distinctive tint of the screen — achieved here by placing lime green tiles underneath a trans-blue window.

This is the third time we’ve seen the T-65 X-Wing Starfighter in brick form, and it’s Lego’s most detailed yet. The 1,949-piece X-Wing costs $239.99 and joins the other sets in the Lego Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series, which include the behemoths that are the 7,541-piece UCS Millennium Falcon and the 6,785-piece UCS AT-AT.

Equipped with 4L4 fusial thrust engines and the KX9 laser cannons, the design of Lego’s latest UCS X-Wing kit doesn’t deviate much from its previous iterations. However, it does feature several hundred more pieces when compared to the 1,304-piece X-Wing set released in 2000 and the 1,559-piece one from 2013. The new X-Wing measures 10.5 inches in height and 21.5 inches in length once complete.

Lego teased a collaboration with BTS earlier this month and, needless to say, the fans had questions. Would the set come with photo cards? Will Jimin play with it on a livestream? Does this mean we’ll see BTS in the next Lego Movie?

We don’t have all the answers to those questions yet (although I need an answer on the Lego Movie stat). We have, however, finally gotten our first glimpse of this highly anticipated Lego set, which (fairly accurately) replicates the set of the “Dynamite” music video, complete with mini-figs of the seven group members.

Frodo, Samwise, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Aragon, plus Elrond, Arwen, Bilbo, and more — there’s room in Lego’s just-announced 6,167-piece elven sanctuary Rivendell for the entire Fellowship to debate The One Ring, and the shards of a particularly noteworthy sword.

Not a lot of room, mind you. The $500 set obviously has nothing on the legendary 200,000-piece recreation of Rivendell by Alice Finch and David Frank that’s been the centerpiece at multiple fan conventions.

For nearly a decade, Lego has welcomed your ideas for what might become official Lego sets — but not ones based on The Legend of Zelda. Since 2014, it has rejected eight Zelda sets that gathered the required 10,000 votes for consideration, even as Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Bowser, and the original NES console have all come to Lego. In 2022, the company even straight-up banned Zelda submissions due to a “license conflict,” making the community think some other toymaker locked down the IP.

But according to Promobricks, one of the foremost Lego leakers, a Legend of Zelda set appears to finally be in development. If true, perhaps it might release alongside the Breath of the Wild sequel this May?

Have you ever wanted to be a Lego designer? Now’s your chance — if you create an original Lego set and submit it here starting February 1st, 2023, you can compete to be one of up to five unofficial sets that Lego will officially produce. Up to 20,000 of your set will be sold to fans around the world, and you’ll even get paid — designers get 5 percent of the proceeds.

They won’t come in a traditional Lego box, mind you, and they won’t be sold in stores. They’ll exclusively be part of the online “BrickLink Designer Program,” where the boxes look like this:

Who needs to travel the globe when you can bring the world’s biggest landmarks to your own home in plastic brick form? Lego has announced its tallest set to date with the new 10,001-piece Eiffel Tower, soaring 149cm / 59 inches tall when fully built. It’s the latest in Lego’s Icons line, joining the ranks of other legendary hallmarks of human history such as the Titanic, the Roman Colosseum, and the Atari 2600 — naturally. The Lego Eiffel Tower will be sold in Lego stores and on its site beginning November 25th for $629.99.

The Eiffel Tower may be the tallest of all Lego sets so far, but it’s the second-biggest in terms of brick count — trailing the Lego World Map by about 1,700 pieces. Though if you’re anxious about its massive height presenting issues in your home, the design allows you to separate it into four sections to build or move it with a little more ease.

As reported by Lego fan sites like Brick Fanatics and Brickset, Lego is discontinuing its Mindstorms kits, which are meant to let people make robots out of Lego bricks, pins, beams, motors, gears, and other pieces, and then program using Lego’s control hubs (via Gizmodo). The devices have been sold as a way to let children and adults easily build and program robots since 1998.

While the company isn’t completely done with the idea of educational robotics kits, it will stop selling its Mindstorms Robot Inventor kit by the end of this year.

One of Lego’s latest projects will strike at a lot of photographers’ nostalgia: a replica Polaroid OneStep SX-70 instant camera. Currently, there aren’t details about what the kit will actually look like, how much it’ll cost, or when it’ll become available, but it’s another example of a fan-made design officially going into production thanks to Lego’s Ideas platform.

The mock-up was created by Minibrick Productions and features a ton of fun, nerdy touches: it has a working viewfinder, lets you spin a gear that shoots out a “picture” from the film tray, and is “nearly to-scale,” according to the project’s description. It also includes a replica box of film, complete with Polaroid’s beautiful pentachromatic rainbow.

This Lego-friendly mechanical keyboard from MelGeek lets you swap out more than just its keycaps and switches (via Gizmodo). If you happen to have a bunch of Lego bricks sitting around, you can redesign the entire case thanks to the Lego studs planted across the sides and bottom of the board.

The keyboard is, fittingly, called the Pixel, and while it’s not officially licensed by Lego, you can build out just about any design — and maybe even incorporate an existing set — right on the case. It sports a tenkeyless design, making it a step down from full-sized boards, as it doesn’t come with a number pad.

James Brown loves building weird displays. Like animatronic skulls, or mechanical bit-flipping cellular automatons. Or, in this case, an entire computer inside a mock Lego brick.

Not just any brick, either. I’m talking about the classic sloped Lego computers from our childhood spaceships, now brilliantly brought to life. They display fake radar scans, scrolling text, even an interactive homage to the Death Star trench run targeting computer that moves when you touch the exposed Lego studs.

In 1822, Augustin Fresnel invented a lens made of ringed prisms that could concentrate beams of light more effectively than reflectors or huge convex pieces of glass. These days, they’re used in spotlights and even most VR headsets. But originally, he designed them for lighthouses — it’s the invention that’s said to have saved a million ships — and today, Lego has announced a motorized lighthouse with its very own fresnel lens.

Make no mistake: it’s a toy — and, at $300 for the 2,065-piece set, a pretty expensive one, too! But Lego’s new light-up Motorized Lighthouse is packed with clever touches, like most of its modern sets aimed at adult budgets. It’ll go on sale on September 1st.