60 years.
LEGO ROCKS!!

-and wherethehellisthat FALCON???

Aw, I had that castle set. The exact same one.
Gods, these days it's all about flashing lights and unique parts (think Bionicle). Most of those unique parts really only fit within their series, too.
But it's nice to know that kids still play with the same toys today that they played with 20, 30 or even 40 years ago. Kinda.

Me and my brothers had many of these. The LEGOLAND Space is always going to be my favorite.

It's not really all about special parts. LEGOLAND sets, including Star Wars, don't contain many special pieces at all. They have expanded the piece catalog, yes, but that has been going on since 1958. I agree with you, however, that BIONICLE is utter crap.

But LEGOLAND keeps being kick-ass.

@Jesus.Diaz: You depicted the wrong castle. The original castle was yellow and released in 1978 (in Yurp, at least).
It was the biggest set available at the time, and I had it! The best set ever (to me).
Nevertheless, thanks for this trip down memory lane. The blue railroadtracks, the figs made from bricks, the minifigs without arms, I rememeber 'em all.

I had some of the armless minifigs. I had some of the tecnic before they were called that, they were called expert system or something like that

@papaguru: really? According to the catalog, that big one was the first one. I have the yellow one here too.

Wow, this brings back some memories. Lego is still a wicked "toy" and will always be thought of as a cultural icon. I still remember going thru the manuals and thinking "WOW!" when each thing was finished. Good, good times.

And yes, as Jesus said, Legoland is awesome!!

The LegoTechnic car that's featured below the castle was alwaya the pinnacle of Lego for me. I was always fascinated with building it, and tweaking the features. The "working" motor, transmission, suspension, and even adjustable seats were the coolest thing for me in 1978.

More recent sets have improved on the design and styling, but there will always be a place in my heart for that chunky tired car, with the yellow seats...

50 years, sorry typo.

I never got any good pieces from Bionicle sets with one exception: The heads and masks make interesting engine-looking pieces that have the look of having a heat shield or something on it. The rest rarely get used.

Based on what I've seen though I wish I had snagged a couple of those Pod sets for the big pod. I've seen cool things done with those.

I have the original Lego X-Wing fighter my wife gave me on a stand on display still, mostly to commemorate the X-Wing that I made as a kid back when all this Star Wars stuff was first happening!
(The wings opened and closed on mine too!) :D

During our recent trip to the big Air & Space museum I actually stopped to reflect that I was surrounded by so much stuff that influenced how I built my own creations from Lego. (and other materials later)

Great stuff. I'll have to pull out the box later and build somethin' a little later. :)

Man, I love my LEGO!

@jesus: seems the first lego castle was the yellow one, released in Europe in 1978. But it wasn't released in the states until '81, 1 year after the grey one (according to your timeline).

You can also tell the yellow one being older by looking at the horses: the ones that came by the yellow castle were made from bricks, instead of the two-peace-already-finished-in-the-box ones that came with the grey castles.

I also had a few grey castles, but they were much less fun than the yellow one: the yellow castle was entirely made from bricks, where the grey ones had prefab walls.

@papaguru: Well, I'm using the data that LEGO sent me on friday, along with their pics.

@enine: When they first came out, they were known as the 'Expert Builder' series; I never had the car, but I did have the crane kit.

Ah... Brings back some memories! Happy birthday Lego brick.

PS- owned a pirate ship (among others) put it once in the bathtub and, to my utter disbelief, it SANK! That was the only disappointment I had with LEGO though :-)

Best. Toy. Ever. My childhood would have been hollow with out them.

When I was a kid my Friday nights would consist of sitting on my bedroom floor plaing with a dresser drawer full of legos and watching TGIF.

I had that pirate ship and the castle in the picture. I miss being a kid.

I think my favorite set that I played with was the Shell service station. It was just a stand-alone single building but they also had a bigger one with a parking garage that I really wanted. They were part of the System or Town series back in the late 80's - early 90's.

Another drool-worthy set for me was the huge Technic car. Not the one in the timeline pic, the one that was like a sports car with blue seats if I remember right and a rear engine and pop-up headlights.

Then there was also the Lego Team series with the advanced details and such. I think I remember there being a big-rig as one of the models.

Lego rocks!

Ooh, Galaxy Explorer. My all-time favorite Lego set. It was awesome.

@fsusmithc2: I still have that Technic car, built by my brothers.

In Argentina I got a friend with whom I played all my childhood, we made histories from the pieces of lego, I must tell you now, with videogames, kids have lost that sense of imagination, creativity, although there are some virtual legos, it's not the same experience.
Moreover, Legos are just a very expensive toy, in south america, there are some cheap imitation so to have the same experience, but when you play a with a real lego, an unforgettable memory have just created.

Jesus Diaz funny and great timeline, "..or invade legoland" hahaha, LOL.

I gave my old LEGO block to my daughter. Some of them are now nearly 40 years old.

love the hitler plug

I finished the Falcon. You'd be surprised how sort of fragile it is. On the other hand, it's a really ingenious design.

It changed my life, and i'm pretty sure i wouldn't be what i am without it. Happy birthday Lego, and much love :)

The very first set I got, but my dad built for me(spent an entire night on it), was a fancy train station, without the extra train set of course.

The first set which I built myself was the space shuttle launch station.

I can still remember all those evenings playing with my dad, building a ship and then destroying it by "shooting" plastic blocks at it with the lego cannons. Good times ^_^

@scarbrtj: Please share the finished Falcon!

@Jesus_Diaz - Papaguru is right. I bought the yellow castle from the Nassau Hobby shop in Princeton, NJ with my first-ever $100 bill (Christmas, 1981). I was 9. My brother (5 years older) took his $100 and bought a bunch of Technics - but he played with my castle more than I did, and eventually ended up converting it to a giant yellow hospital (complete with X-ray and CAT scan). Our LEGOs were never healthier than that brief period of Socialized LEGOmedicine (although more than one minifig lost an arm or legs for "medical research" purposes...) LEGO FTW!!!

i miss my pirates collection. My favorite lego project was making a brick-firing gun :-)

lego also produces more tires than any other tire manufacturer in the world...

I think the first real set I played with was also the galaxy explorer, but could be wrong. I do remember the castle one. But mostly the pieces were all in one big plastic bin, and we just made random stuff out of it. I was way more into connex though (I think that's what it was called).

Google used Mega Bloks, not Lego. The enclosure is on public display in the basement of the Gates building at Stanford. I've heard they were embarrassed about this in retrospect. :)

I had the pirate ship and the castle in the picture too!!!@jaydez:

@briancarlstrom: Weird. I just got the data from them.

In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Lego couldn't hold a candle to the German building toy, Fischertechnik. If you grew up loving Lego, you would have killed for a couple of sets of Fischertechnik. But it was much more expensive than Lego, and only sold in few places in the US. In the 90's Lego started to expand and become more complex while FT pared down production. The new sets you can buy today generally skew towards making one model, but with the older sets you could make ANYTHING. They came with no step by step written instructions: just a couple (2 or 3) pictures of how the models were made at different steps, which forces a kid to to be creative. The older stuff is still one of the most complex building systems available today, yet a 5-year old can use it to make simple car. Do yourself a favor and Google it, or check out Ebay US or Ebay Germany:

[en.wikipedia.org]

With all the LEGOS I had, I never built one of their sets. I always made my own stuff. I didn't even know LEGOS had instructions until years later.

A castle. A big castle that came in a bucket. Glorious days.

This just made my day. I had the pirate ship, the castle, the Technics car pictured, and the Star Wars sets, of course. If fact, I just found them in my basement under about 10 years worth of God-knows-what. Maybe I'll relive the magic later on tonight...

@Jesus Diaz:

By the way, would it be possible for you to get in touch with a couple of the Lego masters Giz features every so often, Jesus? I'd be interested to get their take on this rather momentous occasion. In particular, where did they start and what techniques did they use to perfect their craft?

I remember building my own star wars ships and playing with them when I and now I own them all from them would have been way easier to have the instructions when i was a kid but hey it helped me be creative.

wow just disregard that entire last statement I think I was a little over excited about lego's.

Yellow castle ruled!!!

I have three giant buckets filled with over 4 dozen individual play sets, and this makes me want to break em out and start building again.

Im 27 years old, and I still preserve a backpack full of LEGO pieces from my childhood. (which i haven't opened in years!!! )
Everytime that i need to clean up and let go my childhood stuff, the thing i find most hard to let go are those LEGO and some GI Joes and old video games related stuff LOL

@Kaiser-Machead: Sounds very familiar to what I used to have. We used to spend hours building forts and barricades and such for our G.I.JOE's and such, only to be called in for dinner when our sets were finished.

The first set i remember was one of those big kits that had no single use, but were more of a set of assorted bricks. A blue bucket with a folding handle and 4 large pegs on top that made it like a scaled up funny shaped brick. The first actual set I remember was a yellow submarine from the mid 90s. My lego collection, at the time it was 3/4 of one of the very large rubbermade containers(the 4 foot wide, 15 foot deep, 2 foot tall ones or something close) was given to my cousins. My uncle spent 2 months sorting them all and organizing them ,and doesn't let my cousins(abou 3 years old) play with them unless its supervised so taht he wont mix any sets. I always dumped it al out and grabbed a flat base and ust started building.

@Oracle989: I also had the 40th anniversery set with the Silver brick in it. It had somethin like 300 bricks, 15 minifigs, and 3 base plates. The article made me wish i still had those LEGOs.

Also, BEST. TOY. EVER. sry for triple post.

@FSUSMITHC2: I've got that car. I never had the instructions though. I would love to find them so I can add back the bits that have fallen off over the years though. Does anybody here know where to find them? Or just the set number?

Lego is totally sweet. I have a Lego Star Destroyer (the small one that only costs $100 as opposed to the $300 one) sitting around waiting for me to put together the table I bought to build lego on.

My first set was a box that included directions to build a bunch of different things, the hardest being a big windmill. But over the years I would order all kinds of stuff from the LEGO catalog, amassing about 50lbs of bricks in a bin sitting in my closet.

Overall though, I think my favorite is the Ferrari F1 stuff, especially the technic racecar.

I loved LEGO's when I was a kid (I'm 46 now). I still have two big sets of them, but they weren't those "themed" sets that everyone seems to be writing about. Mine were just a big box with a whole bunch of pieces. On the box were pictures of things you could make. There were no instructions on how to make any of them, you just had to look at the picture and figure it out. It really made you think about how to build what you saw.
Interestingly, I had my kids play with my old sets several months back and they loved it...for about 20 minutes. Then they were back on their DS's and WII. Different generation. So sad. I use to sit down for hours playing with them. But then again, I never had all the electronic stimula that kids today have and crave...

Michael

There is and will be no toy better than Lego. Even though things like N64s and C2Ds have captured my interest since then, I still have every set I got as a kid.

Oh, the memories of Christmas presents that sounded like Legos, opening them, then spreading them all over the floor and starting to build :D

The car/vehicle ones were the best...like the towtruck with the electric boom on it. I even had a "city" set (with people, cars, and trucks) and a "country" set (with 4x4 trucks, tractors, and bulldozers). Also built a racetrack to race the mini IRL cars :)

yeah, I had the yellow castle too. I got this little gem because I didn't wet my bed for a month. Actually now that I think about it I never wet the bad after getting the Lego castle. I always thought the grey castle was the dark night and the yellow was for the good guys. Also had a fire boat that did float. It was the greatest come bath time. Ahh the memories. My son plays with them now and I absolutely love having to help build it. He's to good at it now though, but I still get to play. ;-)

Billions of bricks have been sucked up by vacuum cleaners.