DEEP DIVE
LEGO: from duck to digital
For a company that’s been around for nearly a century, The LEGO Group has been through quite a few transitions – including completely embraced the digital landscape with LEGO apps and games for all ages.
Despite being synonymous with the famous bricks, The LEGO Group’s journey started with a wooden duck, made by carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen, in the early 1930s. When sales of the range started to decline, Kristiansen shifted his focus to making wooden toys. And so, the LEGO brand was born.
The name LEGO was originally created as an abbreviation of the Danish words “leg godt”, which translates as “play well”. What Kristiansen didn’t know then, was that in Latin the name means “put together” – an uncanny prediction about the future of the company.
When the famous bricks came into play about 25 years later, family member Godtfred Kirk Christiansen filed the patent for the modern LEGO brick. Visit LEGO House in Billund, Denmark today, and you can see some of the original moulds and wooden toys.
With the companion app, not only can you explore ahead of time, but you also have a place to check your personal videos and pictures taken during your visit by linking your visitor number with the app.
These days, the App Store is a big part of LEGO’s journey. The LEGO® TV app is a LEGO-centric TV station, where you can watch films, check out builds and get the latest news from the world of the brick. On a bigger scale, The LEGO® Movie™ and its sequel have been huge successes on the big and small screens worldwide.
LEGO® Life is a platform for everything LEGO related. You can share your latest creations, make online avatars and see other LEGO fans’ creative projects.
“No social platform really provides a way to share pictures that are suitable for a younger audience,” explains Robert Lowe, Head of Kids Engagement. “We want LEGO Life to provide that experience to children in a safe environment.”
However, LEGO Life isn’t just about inspiration; it’s also about being practical and creating a library of your building instructions. Having started out with almost 100 digital building instructions, the app lets you, as the builder, choose where to begin and will even cheer you on when you complete parts of your build.
Staying relevant in a world of digital opportunities is a challenge that The LEGO Group embraces. With augmented reality (AR), the opportunity to combine both the physical and digital brick has arisen.
LEGO Hidden Side, you play as two video bloggers who become ghost hunters with the help of Professor J.B. and her app. This amazing tool she’s created lets the young heroes see and chase ghosts.
While Hidden Side can bring physical LEGO Hidden Side sets to life with ARKit, it also offers a complete gaming experience within the app – no sets needed. There is a twist though: you can only play as and collect the evil ghosts in the app. The physical sets are all about the good guys. And by combining these you get the best of both worlds – quite literally.
It’s showing that the LEGO Group has looked long and hard at how to keep the core experience of the LEGO brick intact, while also embracing new ways of engaging a new generation of builders. And we can’t wait to see what’s next.