They sell new Lego sets in stores every day. They might seem expensive for a few bags of plastic bits and some instructions, but then: They've never been cheap.
A kid can still grow up playing with Lego today, just as they've always been able to.
I still remember building my first new Lego widget. Set 918. It was just a small basic spaceship and no real accessories but a little Lego space dude. I'd already scattered the pieces around and stuck them together in strange ways when I noticed that there was an instruction book so I could assemble it the "right" way. That may have been the first instruction book I'd ever followed; I remember the sense of wonderment as I learned the value of it. That model didn't last long before I tore it apart and went back to sticking the pieces together in strange ways. :)
Anyway, it seems like it would have been about $6.50 back then, or about $31 in today's money.
That's not so different from today's prices -- in fact, it looks things may have actually gotten a bit less expensive since then for a given amount of complexity.
That's not ruination; it's the opposite of it. The kids are fine. Lego is fine.
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I do see that someone on eBay that someone hopes to get over $2,000 for a new, sealed copy of set 918. That's a about sixteen more fuckton more than $31.
And I can't justify spending that kind of money on some Lego.
But I don't have to spend that kind of money. If I have a Lego itch that I want to scratch, then I'm a grown-ass adult. I can just go to the store or some online seller or whatever, and buy a new set that I like, and put it together.
I don't need to spend $2k to pretend relive a part of my childhood. I already experienced it once, and I remember that part very fondly.
Nothing here is ruined.
Or, alternatively, it may be possible for a person to be such a profoundly grown-up adult to be unable to see it that way. If that's the case, then I guess you're right: These adults are incapable of being creative with Lego, and therefore adults have ruined Lego. For themselves.
But if that's the case, then it was ruined for the old coots from the very beginning. :P
For us, LEGO was all about ingenuity, improvisation and imagination. We would build a set once, with the alternate back-of-the-box design, without the instructions. Then the real fun would begin, as the new set went in with the bricks we had.
At secondary school (age 11 in UK), the LEGO was cast aside as a mere child's toy. We had moved on and the idea of 'still playing with LEGO' would have been a social faux pas.
Nowadays kids have a ridiculous abundance of LEGO but where is the ingenuity and imagination? Or even the play time? With tablets, phones, video games and so much else, it seems that the set gets built as per the instructions and that is it, job done. The play hasn't even really started.
My parents hosted dinner parties, as was the custom at the time, when restaurants were rare. They quite liked to have our current creations on show, in a low-key way. That is how adults should do LEGO, proud of their kids' creations.
None of our LEGO had a market value, however, every brick had utility and colour value within our LEGO world. We had other things for collecting, even stamps, and they notionally had value.
Hence I am not sure what is going on with people having $200k LEGO collections. That level of abundance just isn't about play, and certainly not for kids. I have no sympathy for the guy, and although the loss is painful, at least he has a chance to grow up a bit!
P.S. Corporate LEGO also ruined it by promoting the whole AFOL thing, but the success of the company has been astounding, considering the product is plastic waste.
You played with legos as a kid. Congratulations, so did lots of other kids at the time, and so do kids right now. Nothing has actually changed. Legos are still sold in a box with instructions, just like they were 20 years ago and 40 years ago and so on and so forth.
The idea that adults can't play with or enjoy legos is, well, genuinely sad, as in, it invokes the emotion of sadness. Adults are allowed to have fun and play games, whether that be building race cars out of metal or out of lego or any other activity they find joy in.
> At secondary school (age 11 in UK), the LEGO was cast aside as a mere child's toy. We had moved on and the idea of 'still playing with LEGO' would have been a social faux pas.
I genuinely wish you had a better childhood. Maybe you would have grown up into a person who can feel empathy for others.
The toy market is under continual change and every child is borne into the context and culture of their era.
There is also opportunity cost. Had I listened to my mother on that fateful day in Woolworths, we could have moved ten foot one way to have bought ourselves sports gear. Since neither my sister or myself can catch a ball, maybe we should have got into badminton, table tennis or football. But we denied ourselves that opportunity because we bought yet more LEGO.
Things were different in period in the USA, particularly for middle class kids, where the abundance of toys was entirely different. My American counterparts of the period had 10x the toys we had. Not jealous, just saying.
As an outsider looking in on American culture in general, there is too much infantilisation going on for my liking. Adults going to Disneyland with no kids in tow, adults watching MARVEL movies with no kids in tow, adults eating McDonalds, adults eating cereal with cartoon characters on the box, adults drinking Coca Cola and so on. Even the car culture is somewhat infantile.
Why has American gone the wrong way, to retreat into a nine-year-old 'inner America'?
Going back a bit, the finest literature came out of the USA, not yet more infantile cruft. Something is amiss.
We have been here before. After WW2, plenty of men returned to retreat into their inner nine year old selves, which kept model trains going for a while after the kids lost interest. But the adults changed the hobby from playing trains to this micro-realistic world with running trains becoming a rarity, rather than what it was all about. This was their coping mechanism, and I understand that.
There's few strangers I've encountered that I've respected more and the rest are all firemen.
I was walking around though, and an associate came up to me and pointed out that the Death Star (IIRC) was about to stop being sold so if I wanted one I should grab it... "... and that we have several of it, so if you want allll of them."
I despise scalping, though, but perhaps I should.
I think that was when Lego speculation was just becoming a bigger thing.
Now, I don't think something like that could retire with stock being on the shelf.
I grabbed Betrayal at Cloud City (75222) from my local Lego Store after it retired because they still had one in stock. I don't think I'll get that lucky again.
Especially with the push for exclusive Gift With Purchase (GWP) sets. It's become slightly ridiculous.
But I'm not a speculator, I'm just a dude who likes assembling plastic bricks.