Lego: Childhood obsession that builds and builds
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BY MIKE MUSGROVE / The Washington Post
Until recently, Will Chapman worked as a Web software developer near his home in Redmond, Wash. But he quit his job a couple of months ago to become a small-arms dealer.
As in very small arms. His most popular item is a tiny M4 carbine, priced at $1, that you could lose in your pocket. The plastic toy weapon snaps neatly into the hand of a Lego man. Like the other skillfully crafted products in his company’s catalogue, you’d never know the piece didn’t come from a Lego kit.
Chapman, like a few thousand other Lego fans who attended the recent BrickFair convention in Tysons Corner, Va., has a serious passion for the brick. He got into the toy-weapon business by accident, mostly, when his 9-year-old craved a World War II-themed Lego set. Lego doesn’t make that kind of set, so Chapman tried making his own with some software design tools and a few experiments in injection molding.
Adult fans of Lego, who refer to one another as AFOLs, are kind of intense like that.
This is a good time for Lego and its aficionados, regardless of their age. The Danish toymaker’s sales rose 20 percent during the first half of this year compared with the first half of 2007. The company credited the ongoing success of its “Star Wars” products and a popular line of “Indiana Jones“-themed kits for the growth.
Until recently, it had looked like the venerable Lego might turn out to be a has-been in the era of video games and Webkinz; the company came close to bankruptcy a few years ago after flops such as a 2002 children’s sci-fi TV show that Lego had hoped would sell a new line of action figures. In 2003, it lost $238 million. After cost-cutting, Lego returned to profitability in 2005.
Lego appears to be ascendant, lending its brand to a popular new line of video games in which players reenact adventures from the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” movies in a playful Lego environment. Shoot a bad guy, for example, and he falls apart into pile of bricks. A “Batman” version of the video game is scheduled for release this month.
An upcoming project is Lego Universe, a virtual online world in which players will pay a monthly subscription to control Lego-figure avatars in a 3-D environment where they’ll be able to virtually interact with other Lego fans and build virtual Lego models. The game is scheduled for release next year.
Though not a sponsor of the fan-organized BrickFair, Lego had a booth there to display some of its coming kits, such as a “Star Wars” Death Star model, which ships later this month at a price of, gulp, $400.
But if the point of playing with Legos is that you can create anything you want, the point of BrickFair was for fans to show off the latest models they’d dreamed up and built themselves. For AFOLs, in other words, it’s all about the MOCs — or “my own creation.”
Galen Fairbanks, 37, grew up playing with Lego and got into them again when Lego debuted its “Star Wars” models, in 1999. In a booth, he displayed his re-creations of scenes from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and from the recent “Star Wars” Lego video games.
Philip Eudy was trying to get a string fixed so that a giant Rube Goldberg-type contraption he’d brought from his home in North Carolina would work again. Eudy is in the subset of Lego fans fascinated by the company’s robotic line, called Mindstorms, and he came to show off his latest machine that uses all sorts of ingenious mechanical strategies for moving a plastic ball around a circuit involving tubes, strings and levers.
It’s almost showtime, and the pressure is on to get that string fixed: When the crowd comes in, “it’s like a Metallica concert,” he said.
Not every serious Lego fan attending the show was lugging a bin of bricks, however. Orion Pobursky, 30, a Navy man who works as a submarine electrician, is a mover and shaker in the virtual Lego community. He’s always loved the brick, but he travels a lot and can’t really take his collection into the cramped space of a submarine, so he runs a Lego fan site that offers special software for those who want to design Lego models on their computers.
“That way, I could play with Lego wherever I go,” he said.
So what’s with all the tech guys and their Lego obsession?
“I think an appreciation for Lego pushes you towards that type of field,” said Richard Schamus, an organizer for BrickFair and a computer security consultant.
No doubt some of the kids here will grow up to be engineers, electricians and techies, too. Eric Desman of Clifton, Va., attending the show with his son, said 9-year-old Noah has recently expressed an interest in growing up to be an engineer — so he can play with Lego bricks forever.
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