LEGO (18 page)

The vending machine raises conflicting emotions: I badly want one for my office, but on the other hand, it is getting frustrating to continually find a more refined version of what I’ve just finished building. We all start with the same bricks, so I can’t stop comparing myself to others. To blow off some steam, I decide to hop on the exercise bike in our sunroom. I play video games while exercising; it makes me feel as if I’m at least accomplishing something while guiding my virtual self to a Super Bowl win in Madden.

Only this time, I put a copy of LEGO Star Wars into my PlayStation 2. Just as LEGO has been used to redefine the concept of porn or art, the video gaming world is getting a blocky makeover. The transition from blocks to pixels seems easy, especially since the introduction of an iconic protagonist—the minifig—as goofy as Earthworm Jim and as identifiable as the original Karate Champ participants. LEGO quietly has established a rich history of video gaming; but it’s really only since 2005 that the gaming community has started paying attention to what LEGO is producing, beginning with the release of the first Star Wars-themed video game.

LEGO initially focused on educational computer games that were blocky, both literally and figuratively. LEGO Island was released in 1997, the main point of the game being that you had to deliver a pizza to a jail. The game was forward thinking in that you could customize the environment, which was constructed of LEGO elements. The next year, LEGO rolled out a few clunkers in LEGO Chess and Creator, a construction simulation game.

But with the release of the Mindstorms line in 1998, the company saw that having a presence in the digital world could be to their advantage. LEGO joined the circuitry circuit, attending the Electronic Entertainment Expo the following year to promote the robotics set. The Bionicle line scored a series of hits with computer games based on the backstories of the action figure-like characters popular with boys. Suddenly it looked as though LEGO might be able to compete with some of the electronic toys that had caused the company’s profits to precipitously decline in the late 1990s. The success of three LEGO Star Wars games developed by Traveller’s Tales led LEGO to roll out additional themed games based on licenses, including Indiana Jones and Batman in 2008.

The early games were largely ignored by adult fans. Many see them as part of the “juniorization” of LEGO, in which the target audience for products seems to be younger and younger. But AFOL Jim Foulds thinks that LEGO can bridge the gap and connect with adult gamers via LEGO Universe, the massive multi-player online role-playing game being developed by NetDevil.

“It’s going to be a LEGO world where you can control everything, and we want adult builders to have a voice in that world,” Jim tells me while setting up LEGO Universe bricks for a display at Brickworld.

With wavy orange hair and a black jacket adorned with the yellow horseshoe-shaped logo of LEGO Universe, he is one of the first people I will see at several conventions this year. Foulds is acting as a community liaison for LEGO, helping to promote the game at adult fan conventions and working with beta testers. He’s also charged with teaching the game development company NetDevil about how LEGO elements might interact.

Adult fans, and all game players, will have a LEGO minifig avatar—a representative in LEGO Universe. And for a community with so much interaction online through enthusiast forums and e-mail, LEGO Universe offers something that previous video games didn’t. This is the chance for AFOLs to overcome geographic limitations and form a real-time virtual community of LEGO builders—basically an evolution from the user groups of the 1990s. Adult fans from Germany could hold a virtual convention with participants from around the globe. It’s a strategy that Joe Meno thinks could really work.

“Just imagine a speed build, where everybody would just show up, get instructions, and then build competitively and be judged. People from all over the real world who could never build together could see each other’s work,” says Joe.

I’m curious about LEGO Universe, but I frankly don’t have high expectations for LEGO Star Wars when I start up the PlayStation. But then I hear the Star Wars music accompanying the game’s credits, and my heart starts pumping harder. I reason that it is solely because I’ve begun pedaling. Forty-five minutes later I’m still playing and enjoying myself. I’m a Jedi and I’m fighting for the rebellion. When my LEGO Obi-Wan Kenobi dies, he dissolves into a bunch of LEGO bricks and immediately comes back to the screen. I’ve noticed I tend to wield my light saber with too much indifference and am as likely to strike my computer-aided Jedi friend as our enemies. I make a mental note to warn Kate if we ever play together. This game is stupid, repetitive, and awesome.

The best part is that it keeps me from having to step foot in that third bedroom and look at the MTT Federation. The mindless killing of LEGO drones is an outstanding way to avoid admitting that I don’t have the courage to face a set that isn’t really more difficult than the Beach House I built with my wife earlier in the month. So I leave for Bellaire on September 4 without having opened the box.

A LEGO penguin and polar bear, inhabitants of the Zoo Room inside the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum, sit on ice blocks made of cotton balls.

I have wanted to talk with Dan Brown, the founder and owner of the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum, since March. He’s my white whale of adult fans. I thought we would meet at Brick Bash; he was one of the sponsors of the public display in Ann Arbor. The museum sent T-shirts, but he never arrived.

“He’s got a huge brain and heart; sometimes his heart just gets in the way of his brain,” Duane Collicott told me at the time when Dan didn’t show.

Then there was Brickworld in June in Chicago, which Dan and I both attended. We ended up waiting in line next to each other outside the LEGO retail store in the Northbrook Court Mall. I turned on my digital recorder and we begin discussing professional LEGO builders. But the store opened two minutes later and the interview was over.

Dan looks a bit like Adam Sandler in profile, with short brown hair and a slight bend in his leg when he walks. At forty-two, the electronics recycler has discovered his passion. He has spent the last five years building one of the largest LEGO collections in the world. As a result, he’s something of a lightning rod in the AFOL community.

First, there was controversy on BrickLink when he bought an existing storefront. Some users felt it was disingenuous for Dan to use the store’s feedback, a system similar to eBay’s wherein customers can rate a seller. They reasoned that Dan was a new seller and shouldn’t benefit from the store’s ratings. And recently Dan has faced pushback from AFOLs at conventions who argue that he is buying in bulk as a reseller, preventing hobbyists from getting the sets they want and taking advantage of the discount offered by LEGO for adult fans.

Underneath the criticism, I usually detect the same jealousy that people exhibit when they talk about Adam Tucker’s architectural models. It’s like being on the playground as a kid. The other guy has more toys, and that seems unfair. I think most adult fans really just want to know: how exactly did the largest collection of LEGO models outside LEGOLAND and LEGO U.S. headquarters end up in an Ohio town with a population of 4,589 people?

I’m heading to Dan’s museum in Bellaire, a three-hour drive south from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, to find out. It’s September 4, the Thursday night before the second annual Brick Show he’s organizing. A bridge away from crossing into West Virginia, I take the exit for Bellaire off Route 7. I pass the Eastern Ohio Regional Wastewater Authority’s treatment plant and turn right just after a brick sign that welcomes me to “Bellaire: The all AMERICAN TOWN.” A white wooden bench with “Toy Museum” painted in red directs me to the left with an arrow. As if in competition, the GPS beeps, saying that the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum is only a half-mile away. All I see are bungalows and Craftsman-style homes packed onto a narrow street.

The street opens up and a two-story brick building, the former Gravel Hill Middle School, stands at the edge of a blacktop parking lot. I pull into the lot, my headlights splashing across a painted mural of a toy train and a LEGO carousel with its frozen-in-motion dancing cows to the right of the open front doors. A two-foot DUPLO figure peers out from one of the primary-color windows. I’m here.

A LEGO gnome sits at the base of the stairs to greet me, but his appearance is unsettling in a Grimm’s fairy tale kind of way.
Up these steps,
he seems to say,
you’ll never be the same.
A life-size LEGO replica of Darth Vader stands in the middle of the first-floor hallway. The Dark Side is slightly calming.

“Dan?” I call out, my voice echoing off the tan tiled walls.

“In here,” a voice rings out to my left. I walk past a Guinness World Record plaque and a LEGO wizard, into a former classroom off the hallway.

“You made it,” says Dan, sitting cross-legged on the floor in jeans and a gray T-shirt as he snaps bricks into a yellow LEGO wall that rings the entire room. A large chalkboard dominates the wall where Dan is working. Dan’s wife, Carol, sits in a folding chair, her head down, face hidden by long, straight black hair as she rips open bags of LEGO knight minifigures. She looks up briefly to say hello before getting back to the task of sorting through shields and weapons. There are hundreds of plastic bags on the floor, and blue LEGO buckets are stacked haphazardly between Dan and Carol. It looks like a messy playroom on steroids. A wooden ramp extends through the door into the middle of the room. It will be the only way to enter after dozens of LEGO baseplates filled with vignettes are placed on the floor representing the interior of the castle.

“Just twenty more to go,” says Dan, gesturing at the yellow LEGO bricks by his feet. The yellow walls, which stretch to the underside of the chalkboard rails, will form the outside of a collective castle display at the convention over the weekend. While he builds, Dan tells me about the beginnings of the museum.

“In 2004, I approached LEGO at the Toy Fair. There I had the good fortune to meet with [LEGO special project manager] Bill Higgins,” says Dan.

Higgins was often involved with new partnerships for LEGO, having worked with a retail developer, the Mills Corporation, to design a holiday promotion that including leasing retail space in fifteen mall locations the previous year.

“Bill did it his own way, and I have no kiss-up ability whatsoever. I just can’t suck up to anyone, and that’s what Bill liked about me,” says Dan, gesturing for me to follow him out of the room.

Our informal tour of the museum has begun. It’s a weird feeling, having unfettered access to an adult fan’s entire collection. My relationship with Dan is starting out on the opposite foot from relationships I’ve had with other AFOLs. He’s showing me his bricks and building rooms before I earn his trust, before we’ve spent any real time together. It’s a bit like entering a cheat code in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! video game.

We enter the Space Room across the hall. In the center of the room, two LEGO children sit inside the framed-out cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. A Yoda mosaic and an R2-D2 model are off to the right, along with a historical collection of space theme sets sitting on shelves. Dan directs me to an eight-foot table that is covered with Bionicle robots, each about the size of a large cat. They are all the work of Alaskan AFOL Breann Sledge, a rare builder in that she’s female and loves to build almost exclusively with Bionicle.

“Those are Breann’s models. She’s amazing. She’s been building for hours over at the LEGO Crack House. I have to go get her soon,” says Dan, looking at his watch.

The LEGO Crack House is the nickname for the second school building that Dan purchased at auction in 2004, where he stores the inventory for his BrickLink store. Breann is one of several adult fans he has invited to come display their work, using a government tourism grant of $2,500 to help defray some of their travel costs.

In the hallway, we come across Tom Erickson bobbing his head to the
Kill Bill
sound track, his skinny frame hunched over a series of custom Star Wars landspeeders. He is an adult fan and vendor in town for Brick Show. Across from him, hundreds of sets are stacked on the floor. They partially block the door to the gift shop—the first room that was completed in the museum (proving Dan is an entrepreneur if nothing else). An adjacent room at the head of the hallway has a Dutch door, with the top half open. This is the master builder’s room, where small models are carefully displayed on wooden shelves stacked nearly to the ceiling. Dan points to a yellow figure sitting at the computer. The model has salt-and-pepper hair and glasses.

“That’s Bill [Higgins]. We couldn’t have done this without him; a lot of the models here are because of him sharing my vision,” says Dan.