<story><title>Lego Island Rebuilder</title><url>https://www.legoisland.org/wiki/index.php/LEGO_Island_Rebuilder</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>herbstein</author><text>&amp;gt; I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of LEGO’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.&lt;p&gt;I work as a developer @ LEGO in Denmark, but I&amp;#x27;m speaking purely for myself here.&lt;p&gt;My only knowledge is of internal software, and I assume you&amp;#x27;re speaking about consumer facing software. LEGO did do video game publishing where e.g. the LEGO Island sequels were released through. And the team at LEGO Interactive, the video game publishing arm of the company, later merged with Traveller&amp;#x27;s Tales to form TT Games that created the LEGO Star Wars games. While they weren&amp;#x27;t developed &lt;i&gt;by&lt;/i&gt; LEGO there was a close relationship.&lt;p&gt;On the more technical software side I&amp;#x27;m personally very fond of LEGO Mindstorm and its ability to make programming more intuitive and tangible while still facilitating &amp;quot;playing with LEGO&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>josephg</author><text>I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration.&lt;p&gt;Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.</text></item><item><author>voidfunc</author><text>Oh man, Lego Island... there&amp;#x27;s a childhood memory from the 90&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;I remember being super-disappointed as a kid that it wasn&amp;#x27;t a free-build type game. There was building, but it was rather guided and there was a story.&lt;p&gt;I wanted something more like Lego Creator but in first-person. Lego never really produced something like that but sometime in the mid-2000&amp;#x27;s someone cranked out Blockland which scratched that itch and then Minecraft came along and I was addicted to that in the early days before it became a big smash hit and was sold to Microsoft.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Also the multiplayer aspects of Blockland and Minecraft put anything LEGO ever created to shame... they just couldn&amp;#x27;t grasp the online&amp;#x2F;community thing and I&amp;#x27;m not sure they wanted to handle the moderation for it either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jacquesm</author><text>Lego &amp;#x27;lost the plot&amp;#x27; for quite a number of years and their only drive was to sell more (poorly designed) sets to survive financially, rather than to see what drove people to buy those sets in the first place: the fact that their kids wanted them. Branching out into the upmarket sets for adults and older kids (large Starwars sets, modular houses and architectural sets such as the London Bridge) was pretty clever as well: you have to sell far fewer sets to people with much deeper pockets to make money that way.&lt;p&gt;The idea of &amp;#x27;free bricks&amp;#x27; such as were available in software was a thing that horrified Lego management, and that&amp;#x27;s why they &lt;i&gt;couldn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; have invented Minecraft. If they had it would have been buried deep. The obvious next step was to allow anything created in such an environment to be immediately orderable, Lego experimented with that for a bit, shipping &amp;#x27;MOC&amp;#x27;s, but ended up having to withdraw it due to overwhelming success. Obviously that is something you should then fix but instead the idea was - as far as I know - abandoned.</text></comment>
<story><title>Lego Island Rebuilder</title><url>https://www.legoisland.org/wiki/index.php/LEGO_Island_Rebuilder</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>herbstein</author><text>&amp;gt; I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of LEGO’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.&lt;p&gt;I work as a developer @ LEGO in Denmark, but I&amp;#x27;m speaking purely for myself here.&lt;p&gt;My only knowledge is of internal software, and I assume you&amp;#x27;re speaking about consumer facing software. LEGO did do video game publishing where e.g. the LEGO Island sequels were released through. And the team at LEGO Interactive, the video game publishing arm of the company, later merged with Traveller&amp;#x27;s Tales to form TT Games that created the LEGO Star Wars games. While they weren&amp;#x27;t developed &lt;i&gt;by&lt;/i&gt; LEGO there was a close relationship.&lt;p&gt;On the more technical software side I&amp;#x27;m personally very fond of LEGO Mindstorm and its ability to make programming more intuitive and tangible while still facilitating &amp;quot;playing with LEGO&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>josephg</author><text>I had the same feeling. It’s so weird how companies can miss such an obvious thing. The core fantasy of lego is engineering - “you can make anything you can imagine”. Even if you aren’t good at designing things, that’s still the core aspiration.&lt;p&gt;Minecraft fulfils that fantasy far better than most (all?) of the video games lego has made. I wonder if it’s just that, like banks, software is outside of lego’s core competencies. When it comes to software, their leadership has no taste.</text></item><item><author>voidfunc</author><text>Oh man, Lego Island... there&amp;#x27;s a childhood memory from the 90&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;I remember being super-disappointed as a kid that it wasn&amp;#x27;t a free-build type game. There was building, but it was rather guided and there was a story.&lt;p&gt;I wanted something more like Lego Creator but in first-person. Lego never really produced something like that but sometime in the mid-2000&amp;#x27;s someone cranked out Blockland which scratched that itch and then Minecraft came along and I was addicted to that in the early days before it became a big smash hit and was sold to Microsoft.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Also the multiplayer aspects of Blockland and Minecraft put anything LEGO ever created to shame... they just couldn&amp;#x27;t grasp the online&amp;#x2F;community thing and I&amp;#x27;m not sure they wanted to handle the moderation for it either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josephg</author><text>Oh I love mindstorms. We used it years ago as part of my CS program at university. Our assignment was to figure out how to route trains around a network in haskell (given a track layout and some goals). Some students and I worked to connect the haskell API to real trains through lego RCX bricks. It was super fun, and it (for the first time) gave me the sense that I can make anything.&lt;p&gt;But mindstorms, PoweredUp, Boost and the whole lego ecosystem at the moment is a mess. The point of lego bricks is that they&amp;#x27;re inherently compatible - any brick can connect to any other brick, going back for decades. But strangely, lego&amp;#x27;s software doesn&amp;#x27;t follow this at all. Despite all running through bluetooth, Mindstorms and PoweredUp work through entirely different (and as far as I can tell, incompatible) software and protocols. Mindstorms programs (which can run on either a mindstorms brick or a PC) should be able to, through bluetooth, connect to and drive any number of mindstorms&amp;#x2F;poweredup&amp;#x2F;boost controllers and use them to connect to additional sensors and motors. Then you could use the mindstorms software to program poweredup robots, use mindstorms bricks as the brain for large robots with poweredup hubs, use train controllers as inputs into mindstorms programs, and so on. But you can&amp;#x27;t. Its all strangely siloed by &amp;quot;theme&amp;quot;. Despite using the same plug, you can&amp;#x27;t even use all of the poweredup &amp;#x2F; train &amp;#x2F; mindstorms sensors and motors interchangeably with all of lego&amp;#x27;s microcontrollers.&lt;p&gt;On the software side lego maintains two separate &amp;amp; mutually incompatible scratch style programming languages, driven through different apps, to talk to physical hardware that is fundamentally, technically deeply compatible. From any other company I would understand. But this is LEGO. The whole point of lego is that it all connects together. If you have a voice at lego, please help the software teams understand and uphold the same mandate for fundamental interconnectedness in code.</text></comment>