Lego 90th anniversary interview – rebuilding nostalgia for spaceships and castles-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

The all-new Galaxy Explorer and Lion Knights’ Castle sets (pic: Lego/Metro.co.uk)

Celebrating 90 years of classic toys has led Lego to reimagine some of the company’s most beloved sets in brand new modern designs.

This August sees Lego commemorating 90 years in business, but when it first started it was just a small family company making wooden toys and it was quite a while before the iconic plastic bricks and minifigures of today emerged to conquer the world. The late 70s is when Lego really took off, introducing the minifigure and making playsets and vehicles that could be played with as regular toys and not just hands-off models.

To celebrate the Lego Group’s anniversary they’ve gone back to that seminal era for inspiration and to reimagine two of the most popular early sets: the Galaxy Explorer from 1979 and the King’s Castle from 1984. Although, as you’ll find out in the interview below, the new castle is actually an amalgam of several different designs from throughout the years – including the iconic yellow castle from 1978.

We spoke to lead designers Mike Psiaki and Milan Madge about not just the new sets but what it’s like to be a Lego designer, and how you go about creating such complicated designs. The actual anniversary is on August 10, with the new Galaxy Explorer out on August 1 and Lion Knights’ Castle on August 8 from Lego.com. There’s also special events planned for the anniversary at the Lego Store in London, which we’ll report on nearer the time.

GC: I know Lego designers can be from anywhere in the world, so where are you two from? I thought I heard an English accent there?

MM: Yeah. I’m from England. I’m from Loughborough.

MP: And I’m from upstate New York, in the US.

GC: I love the idea that everyone in the world wants to work at Lego. If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you guys?

MP: I’m 30 and Milan is… 28?

MM: Yeah.

GC: So I don’t think you remember these sets from the first time round, do you?

MP: Well, we don’t remember being able to buy them in a shop, but that’s one of the beautiful things about Lego building, and one of the reasons we want to do these models, is that Lego bricks exist through generations. So I have older brothers and my parents handed stuff down to me. I never actually had the Galaxy Explorer, but we had lots of the old castles. And I think you had the same thing, right? You got them from an uncle?

MM: No, I actually had older friends that kind of stopped playing with their Lego bricks and I inherited that. So I never had the classic Space stuff. I had a few of the older Castle lines from the eighties, but never a full castle. It was mainly the smaller stuff.

GC: I got this wrong at first, as I thought the new castle was primarily based on the yellow one from the 70s, but it’s a later one, isn’t it? From the 80s?

MM: Yeah, so actually with both these models, rather than the Lego Group coming forward and saying these are the iconic sets that we want to make we actually held a vote on a platform called Lego Ideas, which is a platform where fans can upload ideas for new sets and some of ’em can go through to production. And we actually said, ‘We want to celebrate 90 years of Lego history’ and we uploaded a list of maybe 30 themes from our past and fans could vote on what themes they wanted to see be brought back as sets for this.

MP: And we were quite specific. We weren’t just saying, ‘Do you want Castle to return? Do you want Space to turn? We were like, ‘Do you want the Lion Knights? Do you want the Forestmen? Do you want the Black Falcons?’ And our fan community actually had a bit of an uproar about it because they were very annoyed that we’d broken up all the castles, so it meant no single one kind of outright won the vote as compared to Bionicle, for example, which we just listed as one theme – even though it has a bunch of sub-themes.

But for us, it was super useful because then we were able to recognise, through that vote, which of those castle lines were the ones that people were excited about. ‘Cause if you just say Lego castle, that’s way too broad for a line that has a 40 year history. You can’t put in every different group of knights, so we, from that poll, we learned very quickly that it was the Forestmen, the Lion Knights, and the Black Falcons – which all existed kind of at the same time.

One of many inspirations for the new castle (pic: Lego)

GC: Just seeing photos of the original sets was a real blast of nostalgia for me, as they happened to be the two I had as a kid. But now I understand that they were actually the most popular sets, and they were kind of everywhere at the time.

MM: I think those two sets are kind of the… I guess we would call ’em hero models. The big dream set from the Space and Castle launches in ’78. As that was the first time that Lego actually started making minifigure play theme models.

MP: Yeah. There was kind of a big shift in approach to product lines at that time, where instead of it just being models that you could build, it was much more focused on the actual play patterns with the thing that you construct. So Castle and Space were the original two and it was the yellow castle and the Galaxy Explorer, like Milan says – those were the two biggest ones.

A lot of people talk about the Galaxy Explorer, and they remember it, but they more often owned one of the smaller spaceships, but they know the Galaxy Explorer because that’s the one that you would see everywhere, but not necessarily be the one that you would get for a birthday or save your money and be able to buy, just because it was so big and awesome. But the smaller ones really evoke the same feeling. And it’s the same with the castle. There was jousting sets and a lot of other stuff, but the one that you would dream about would always be the biggest, most awesome one.

GC: I guess that means that those two sets were the beginning of the modern era of Lego, because everything before that looks very basic and old-fashioned but those sets still have a lot of the same appeal as a modern one.

MM: Yeah, I think they kind of both hinge around the birth of the Lego minifigure and the idea that a kid can start role-playing with this little character, which they hadn’t been able to do before. And that opened up a lot more play opportunities for us.

MP: Yeah, it was really the beginning of a focus on playing with the things that you build instead of building being the only form of play. We also have a lot of other types of play that we have introduced in the last years, and we also still have models that are really just about building, but that core play theme concept has survived in a lot of different forms since then. So, yeah, I would say it is the birth of modern… the most popular version of Lego right now.

The original Galaxy Explorer in all its glory (pic: Lego)

GC: I’d imagine this is a project where you went through a lot of different designs and concepts, but there’s actually a very different approach going on with the two sets. The Galaxy Explorer is pretty close to the original design, but the castle is much bigger and more detailed. Why was that the direction you decided to take?

MP: So with the spaceship, we’ve actually had concepts of this in various… the first concept I built was in 2012, right when I started at the Lego Group, and Benny’s spaceship from The Lego Movie… I saw those big, transparent yellow windscreens. I was like, ‘Oh man, those are awesome! Benny’s Spaceship is cool, but could we make something that’s a little bit more directly tied to that original set?’

So the very first version I built was way back then. And then it’s just been like going through various design philosophies through that time. There are versions that are, ‘What if we built a ship that’s the same size, but is very much just inspired by the idea of the Galaxy Explorer?’ So the shapes and the functions and everything is completely different. But as we got more into the development, we had a point where we were showing the model to others… and this was for a different purpose, this was five years ago or so and we were showing them the model and they were not very impressed by how far we had strayed from the original.

And so that was something that was on the back-burner. And so when we got around to the 90th anniversary and we said, ‘We’re gonna do the Galaxy Explorer!’ We were thinking, ‘Okay, what makes sense? How do you honour that set with a proper homage?’ And we were thinking about all of these kinds of re-imaginings that we do, where we use modern shapes and make it look sleeker or give it new functions or whatever. But it’s like, are we trying to say we are making a better version of the Galaxy Explorer? Because that’s impossible. You can make something that’s different, no doubt about that, but you can’t actually make it better because that’s subjective, right?

What is it about the original Galaxy Explorer that makes people love it? At the same time, we were also just thinking about nostalgia in general and we were recognising there’s this phenomenon where people play with the Lego sets from their childhood or see old Lego… we buy a lot of old Lego sets for fun, just to build, and we would get these sets and build and be like, ‘This isn’t quite what I imagined it would be’ or ‘It’s smaller than I expected’. So there’s this phenomenon of remembering the Lego sets from your childhood as being bigger and more impressive than they actually are.

We got this idea in our head, like what if we were to just scale the Galaxy Explorer up so that it felt like it should when you were a kid. And I used my son as reference. At the time we were making it he was six years old and I’m one-and-a-half times his height.

So I used him as a scaling factor for the ship. I actually wanted to make a fake photo where we would take a picture of my son holding the original and then just say that it’s a picture of me as a kid playing with it, but somehow people didn’t like that deception. [laughs] So that was like the driving principle behind the Galaxy Explorer.

And then we’re not saying, ‘Oh, we’re making a better Galaxy Explorer.’ We’re saying we’re making a bigger Galaxy Explorer, which some people might say, ‘Oh, bigger is better’ but we’re not trying to say this is better than the original, we’re paying homage to the original. We’re showing some things that maybe you couldn’t see before when it was smaller, but we’re not trying to say the old one is now obsolete, this is the Galaxy Explorer. We’re saying this is almost like the adult version of the Galaxy Explorer.

King’s Castle from 1984 was another big influence (pic: Brickset)

MM: One of the really interesting things about the classic Space line is that it has a very, very strong design language. The straight-lined triangles, no rounded parts, and so that’s a very clear aesthetic across the entire line of Lego space from that era. Whereas Castle is a little bit more difficult because there’s lots of different groups within Castle and they all have their own aesthetic, and aesthetic changes over time, and I think that leads to when you ask someone what’s the best Lego castle. If you ask someone what’s the best Lego spaceship from the era, Galaxy Explorer is just… immediate.

MP: Well, that’s not quite true. It’s more that no one will argue with you, if you say that Galaxy Explorer is the ultimate Lego spaceship. People might say, ‘I actually have a different one that’s my favourite, but I recognise that Galaxy Explorer is the king.’ But Castle is completely the opposite.

MM: Castle, the jury’s out, no one knows which one’s the best. I imagine that a lot of people can’t even name them, you know? There’s dozens of them and I think when we first started working on the castle we said, ‘Okay, so what is the castle that we’re gonna be basing this on?’ Because the Lion Knights were the faction that were proving most popular in the vote.

There were several castles that were related to that group of knights but none of them were really standing out as the icon of Lego Castle. And when we started thinking about it more, we started taking learnings from a set we did a couple years ago called Pirates of Barracuda Bay, which was based on the Lego Black Seas Barracuda, an old pirate ship.

What we learned with that was our memories of Lego Castle, and also Lego Pirates, is very much like opening the catalogue as a kid and seeing this whole world, this universe, spread out with all the different sets in the environment. And we wanted to capture that entire world in the model rather than just doing a redo of one specific set. So that’s how we kind of steered that direction with the castle model.

The new Galaxy Explorer is built with modern techniques and pieces (pic: Lego)

GC: The new castle looks really realistic, to the point where you could’ve based it on an actual real one, like Dover or Caernarfon or somewhere. But the 70s and 80s ones, they were more like how a child imagines a castle would be…

MM: Yeah, it’s a really interesting point that a lot of real castles don’t look anything like the toy version of a castle. [laughs] There’s a few that have that kind of perfect symmetry, like Bodiam or something, but we spent a lot of time looking at details of real castles. We did some things like the drawbridge, for example, as a historical type of counterweight drawbridge that Lego has never done before. So there are details in there that are accurate to medieval history.

MP: We looked at a lot of real castles but as soon as we started to look closely, we were like, ‘Okay, these things are enormous!’ The proportions of the courtyards and the tunnels, the staircases, and all of that. We built some bits, like some cool spiral staircases and other bits from real castles where we were like, ‘Oh, this would be so cool to put in.’ And then we realised this would be 90% of the model, if we wanted to include this. Real castles are just way too big. So I think that’s where we focus much more on the details of real castles that we like, and then try to figure out how do we combine those all into something that’s actually a realistic size for a Lego model?

MM: We had a version originally where we had the curtain wall and outer bailey and stuff to kind of expand it. It was enormous. And, like, where’s anyone gonna put this?

MP: A lot of those old castle designs, especially in England and France, they really weren’t thinking about how it would be played with as a toy. [laughs] We wanted to do one of those entrances where you have multiple portcullises, and you can drop them down, and we built it but we’re like, ‘There’s no way to play with any of this!’

And it’s also so long and deep that the model needs to become enormous. So there’s a lot of different factors, like just how big you make it, we also wanted it to fit nicely on a shelf, things like forced our hand on a lot of decisions.

MM: In many ways it actually made it quite difficult. ‘Cause we started essentially from scratch. We had no layout or anything, we had to build this from the ground up.

MP: Yeah, normally real castle builders get at least a piece of ground where they’re gonna build their castle and that informs the decisions of where you put the gate and how high the walls will be, and where you need your towers. But we’re just like, ‘Okay, we can do absolutely anything we want, but we also can only do so much.’

The new Lion Knights’ Castle is lot, lot bigger than the originals (pic: Lego)

GC: So how do you start designing a set? Do you sketch things out? Do you use a computer? Or do you just start right off with Lego?

MM: It’s different on each project, but for the castle, as Mike said, we built some details. We built a gate, we built a drawbridge, we built some half-timber buildings, and it never really became a full castle until I sat and just drew it by hand; sketched out what we would want the front of the model to look like. And then we had a discussion about it, like, ‘Ah, needs to be maybe a bit more asymmetrical. Maybe that tower needs to come down.’ And then once we kind of had that 2D drawing of it is when we started working out how would that drawing translate into a floor plan that we could start building from the ground up?

One of the things we always say is really a challenge with these things is you are wanting to build, say the top of the castle first, right? So where the gate is and where the towers go, that’s the stuff that we kind of visualise. But to get to that point, we have to have built all of the landscape first. So you kind of have to start building bits of the model upside down to try and figure out where things are gonna go.

MP: What are some of the oldest bits on this? I’m trying to think. The half-timber walls were really early on, the tree was really early on. The portcullis? The window in the centre, that was really early on.

GC: You mentioned you were building old sets, as professionals what would you characterise as the main differences between then and now?

MP: I think part of what’s changed is the diversity of elements in our portfolio. It’s a very interesting thing to look at because we don’t actually have… well, I don’t know the numbers, but the last time I checked we don’t actually have more elements than we did in, say, the 80s. It’s just that the elements we make today, we make much more multi-purpose building pieces. So in the 80s you would make a special spaceship cockpit or a special spaceship thruster or a lift arm for a catapult… so any one theme would have its 15 or 20 special elements that would really not get used outside of that.

So as a builder you would probably not collect every single Lego set. You would actually only get a portion of that portfolio of bricks into your collection at home. And then it would be quite basic, but the parts we’ve been making for the last 20 years are very multi-purpose, which then proliferates across the whole portfolio. So even if you’re still only getting three or four Lego boxes, you’ll end up with a much broader selection of parts, which just allow us to do a bigger variety of things.

The new Galaxy Explorer still has the little buggy in the back (pic: Lego)

GC: That’s interesting, because I’ve heard many adults – who don’t really play with Lego now – suggesting the opposite for new sets and complain that they’ve been dumbed down. But as you say, that’s not actually true.

MM: You can look at the castles, for example, not so much the yellow castle, but all the grey castles from the 1980s are mainly built out of big pre-fabricated wall elements that are just a wall with a window and some brick decoration on it. And the new castle that we’ve built is just made out of regular 1×4 Lego bricks.

MP: I remember when I was a kid, my brothers and I, we had a very rudimentary sorting system for our Lego bricks. And we had the bricks sorted by theme. There was the Castle bin, the Pirates bin, a Space bin. And you couldn’t do that today because all of the parts are so much more interchangeable across themes. I think Lego bricks have become a lot more multi-purpose than they were 30 or 40 years ago, which is interesting.

I think that as designers… the piece I was gonna mention is the piece that’s on top of the walls that kind of forms the top of the crenulations. We call it a bread piece, but it was originally made to build picture frames for Dots. So there’s lots of things… the thatched roof is made from a claw piece that was made for Nexo Knights. That kind of reuse of parts was much less prevalent 30 years ago.

GC: That’s one of my favourite things nowadays, when you see how seemingly very specific parts are recoloured and reused for something completely different.

MP: I think it’s part of the thing that we have to be a little bit careful with. ‘Cause I think sometimes we’re tempted to go a little bit too far and use a little bit too much imagination in the reuse of a part, which can feel really clever but it doesn’t quite give the same polished feeling… for me, a Lego model, every brick, even if it’s a really creative use, every brick should feel like it’s made for that purpose.

We can be tempted to get a little bit too creative sometimes with the parts usage. If it’s a 90% solution, but the part is so crazy, then we say, ‘Ah, come on, it’s worth it.’ But really, I’d rather get a 100% solution and not be quite as crazily creative with the elements. But that’s kind of a balance and every designer treats that problem a little bit differently in their approach to how they make their models.

The new Galaxy Explorer is not a military vessel (pic: Lego)

GC: What about the idea that the classic Space sets didn’t have any guns or weapons? You had parts that vaguely looked like them, but it was all based around exploration. The castles did have swords and halberds and so on, but I know the reason the first one was yellow was because they didn’t want kids building tanks and military vehicles out of grey bricks.

MP: In the new Galaxy Explorer there’s nothing… it’s meant as an exploration ship. I mean, maybe they could use their wrench as some kind of blunt weapon. I’m not condoning that. [laughs] But they’re definitely much more focused on exploring and that was something we were wondering because we’ve seen a lot of, in my mind, the classic Space squadron force – I don’t know what you want to call them. I don’t even think force is right.

The modern day equivalent would be we have NASA, but then we also have the air force. Right? So I think the more militaristic version of classic Space vehicles is not blue and grey with transparent yellow cockpits. I don’t know what it looks like, maybe one day you’ll see it, but these guys are definitely out there to explore strange new worlds.

GC: Do you have anyone still working at the company that worked on the original models? Have they seen the new ones?

MM: Yeah, there’s a guy called Niels Milan Pedersen who is a designer that has been here… 40 years or something. He started in ’77 or ’78. And he actually designed all of the original Lion Knights characters for the Castle sets. And his first set was a classic Space set. He’s an element designer now, he makes new Lego bricks and his first element that he made was the space camera, which is probably what you were referring to. Something that as a kid, I know I used a lot as a gun.

MP: I did use it as a camera, but I also used it as a bazooka or a laser gun.

MM: So he’s still here and we’ve been talking to him a lot about the sets recently, actually. He’s played a huge part in both our childhoods, a lot of the sets that I had as a kid was things that he designed.

MP: We also got to talk with Kjeld Kirk Krisitansen, who is the grandson of the founder of Lego, and now it’s his son Thomas who is head of the board of the company. But Kjeld has a soft spot for these original play theme models. So we actually got to show him what we were doing and get some input from him, which is not really design per se, but I think it adds a really nice level of authenticity to what we’ve done to kind of have it approved or gotten a pat on the back for our work from him.

The Lion Knights’ Castle opens up to reveal a multitude of rooms inside (pic: Lego)

GC: You’ve already alluded to why there isn’t a baseplate with the new Galaxy Explorer, but that must’ve been a big decision. I distinctly remember that as it was something that worked well with all my regular Star Wars toys as well.

MP: We still make the totally flat base plates. I don’t know the last time we made a raised base play though. It’s not completely out of the question that we could make a raised base plate, but when we were looking at the Galaxy Explorer, now being so much bigger… We thought that kind of takes away the focus from the ship.

The other thing we were wondering is what colour do we do if we make a baseplate for it? The original is grey… it’s just a little bit too much grey when you get that big. The ship is grey and all of these plates are grey and then also you need the little moonbase. And we thought that even though those things are part of that original set the most important part is the spaceship.

That moonbase isn’t the most impressive moonbase that’s part of classic Space. There are more awesome ones. So we thought, let’s just put the focus only on the ship. And we give the fans the opportunity to now take this new design language that we’ve created and let them come up with the rest of it. So my that’s what I hope to see happen. I’ve actually already seen on Flickr, there’s someone that has created a… one of my favourite classic spaceships is one called Starfleet Voyager.

It’s white and grey, with transparent blue windscreens, and within hours of us announcing this set, someone had already made a upscaled version of Starfleet Voyager, using the same stylings that we’ve created here. So for me, that was my dream that that would happen with this set. So to see it is very heart-warming.

MM: We’ve also seen the same with the castle. ‘Cause we discussed doing a raised baseplate for the castle as well, because a lot of the 1980s castles had that. And yeah, we’ve seen people online taking the box image from this castle and creating the outer walls, making it bigger, adding new towers… and that kind of flexibility that the built landscape offers you means that people can re-landscape and change the environment that this castle sits in, in order for them to expand it.

Milan and Mike with one of their creations (pic: Lego)

GC: So the obvious next question is whether there’ll be more classic-looking sets beyond just the 90th anniversary?

MP: There’s no reason we couldn’t see more.

MM: That’s a very diplomatic answer. [laughs]

GC: It’s better than I was expecting! But to put it in terms that might be easier to answer are there any other specific sets you’d also like to work on?

MP: Why don’t we just say the things we’d love to remake, without anything to do what might become a set. We’re just talking amongst ourselves as lifetime builders of Lego bricks and dream projects that we would love to do as designers!

I think we would love to make a modernised version of the Black Knight’s Castle, from 1993 or so. We would love to make a big Forestmen’s hideout, like Forestmen’s River Fortress – take that set and redo it. That would be so much fun to make. Starfleet Voyager I already mentioned, is my all-time favourite classic Space set. But also maybe doing a little bit more modern Space, like Space Police or even some of the Blacktron ships.

It would be neat to see a modern version of the Robot Command Center (pic: Brickset)

GC: What about new designs in the same styles? Mechs have become quite a thing with modern Lego but they weren’t really part of the classic Space theme – and yet the fan-made one for Lego Ideas, a few years ago, was really good.

MP: We’ve been working on an alternate model for the Galaxy Explorer, where if you take two volumes of the bricks – so if you manage to get your hands on two – there’s this old classic Space… it’s not really a mech, it’s like a command centre that looks kind of like a robot.

GC: Oh, the big blue thing. Yeah. I saw that when I was researching this, I don’t remember it from the time, but I know what you mean. [It’s called the Robot Command Center – see the image above]

MP: I’ve been working on a version of that. That would be, again, 1.5 times scaled up. We’ll definitely share some pictures of it at some point, but I don’t know if we’ll ever be allowed to release instructions for it. But yeah… who knows, let’s see how people react to these sets and let’s get ready for the 91st anniversary!

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter.

MORE : Lego Atari 2600 recreates the golden era of blocky graphics

MORE : Lego Store London set to be the biggest in the world with new revamp

MORE : Lego has announced a gigantic £230 animatronic Bowser

Follow Metro Gaming on Twitter and email us at gamecentral@metro.co.uk

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

Entertainment – MetroRead More