Lego Ideas, the platform where fans can design Lego sets, then see them licensed and sold in stores, has given us some fantastic builds over the years. Sadly, this big Hyrule Castle set won’t be one of them.
There are a few hurdles a project has to clear before being signed off by Lego. The first is that it needs to get over 10,000 votes from members of the community. Then it has to be selected by judges from a pool of all the designs that managed to hit that threshold. Then it needs to actually be given the licensing green light, something achieved by loads of Ideas winners in the past (from Ghostbusters to Friends).
Artem Biziaev’s Hyrule Castle got the 10,000 votes part, but it wasn’t among the winners announced in Lego’s blog post from last week. It’s unclear at which subsequent hurdle it fell over, but given the quality of the build, it doesn’t seem outrageous to me to guess that the issue was licensing. Nintendo’s current Lego partnership results in sets that, while unique in their own ways, aren’t as traditional as this.
Which is a damn shame! I’m really not a fan of any of the existing Nintendo x Lego sets, as—call me old-fashioned here—all I wanted from the deal was traditional Lego playsets. Locations and characters we all love, recreated in that trademark Lego style. I was thinking a Peach’s Castle playset, an Animal Crossing village, a big...well, Hyrule Castle, all of them populated with lil’ Nintendo minifigs.
Since that’s not happening, then, all we’ve got are Biziaev’s images to go on, revealing his plans for everything from hidden treasures to a full-blown transformation after Ganon’s Ocarina of Time takeover.
While we’re on the subject, the latest round of Ideas announcements also showed that Lego and/or Nintendo also passed on sets based on Animal Crossing and Metroid, while an Among Us build also missed out.
