LEGO’s take on Sony’s classic console is a love letter from one community of creators to another. In a new designer interview, LEGO Design Director Frederic Roland Andre has explained how the 1,911-piece LEGO PlayStation set (72306) came to be, and why getting the feel of the 1994 original exactly right was the hardest part of the build.
LEGO PlayStation (Credits: IGN)
LEGO PlayStation designer interview reveals a love letter to play
The set, officially unveiled by The LEGO Group and Sony, is a near 1:1 scale recreation of the original PlayStation, complete with a standard controller and a few surprises waiting inside. Speaking about the project, Andre summed up the philosophy behind it: Play takes many forms, from millions of polygons to a couple of pixels or a big pile of bricks.
He added: Play as a LEGO designer means to me creativity, imagination, and a lot of fun. That spirit runs through the whole set, which is packed with interactive details rather than being a static display piece.
As Andre explained: When designing this set, we tried to add a lot of play into it. We have the opening button, we have the light, and of course, we have the drawers with all the Easter eggs inside as well. In the 1,911 bricks of the set, some of them are dedicated to two dioramas inside the PlayStation.
LEGO PlayStation set hides Ape Escape and Gran Turismo dioramas
Those two hidden dioramas are the set’s secret stars. One pullout section represents 1999’s Ape Escape, complete with swappable red and blue monkey helmets, while the other focuses on Gran Turismo, the first instalment of Sony’s iconic racing series, with a miniature track and scaled-down cars. Both dioramas can be removed from the console and displayed separately.
The set also features functional mechanisms for the console’s Power and Open buttons, and a controller that can actually plug into the brick-built console. The completed model measures around 10.5 inches (26 cm) wide, and the set launched at $179.99, with early access for LEGO Insiders and PlayStation Direct customers before general release.
But the biggest challenge, Andre said, was nailing the dimensions. He explained: The most important thing to get right when we created the console were the dimensions, the real feel of the console back in the day in 1994. The team around the design of the PlayStation is super-passionate about gaming and it was super-challenging to reproduce all the right dimensions, especially on the controller for it to feel right.
For fans who grew up with the original PlayStation, that attention to detail is what turns a clever LEGO set into a genuine nostalgia piece, a grey box of bricks that somehow feels like 1994 all over again.
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Source: IGN — read the full story there.
