A Minecraft-like scene made using mostly square Lego bricks
Minecraft is coming to Lego!
Or maybe Lego is coming to Minecraft.
I'm not really sure which makes more sense, and I don't know that it matters. I'm so jittery with schoolboy excitement right now that I can barely type.
Lego announced Tuesday via CUUSOO – a site where Lego fans share original model concepts and create petitions to see them become boxed Lego products – that it would develop official Lego sets based on the smash hit indie game, which has sold more than four million copies to date.
The winning concept was submitted by Mojang, the Swedish studio that developed Minecraft. Apparenty, it earned the required 10,000 votes in the space of just two days, a record for the site.
The small developer (if it can still be considered small after making tens of millions of dollars from a downloadable game in the space of a year) announced that it will donate to charity the 1 per cent royalty given to authors of CUUSOO projects that become official Lego sets.
Minecraft and Lego are, of course, about as perfect a match as can be imagined. Minecraft has players connecting a wide variety of square-ish blocks to create pretty much anything they can imagine in a virtual world. Lego does basically the same thing, but in the physical world. Combining the two opens myriad possibilities. More than that, it just feels right. The synergy is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
But just what sort of Minecraft Lego sets are in store? Will we build Minecraft environments? Or will it be something more meta, like using hundreds of Lego blocks to create a single, highly detailed Minecraft block?
The humbug in me wants to criticize the idea of official Minecraft Lego sets as foolish, since anyone who owns Lego probably already has the basic elements required to create Minecraft-esque scenes. Just gather up all of your square, four-studded bricks – the most popular of all Lego elements – and have at it.
Plus, the idea of using Lego instructions to build a Minecraft scene flies in the face of the creative spirit behind the game, which encourages players to build from blueprints in their minds.
But that's just me playing devil's advocate.
Truth is, I'll be first line when Minecraft Lego sets arrive at the newly opened Lego store in the mall by my house (I'll tell my wife I'm going shopping for the kid). This is just the sort of cross-promotional product I can get behind, and I'm willing to bet there are few thousand – perhaps even a few hundred thousand – fans of both Minecraft and Lego who will feel the same way.