I’ve posted before that Lego in the USA in the 1970s consisted of multi-colored bricks of different sizes. That’s it. And usually someone replies “You’re wrong” and points to some Lego mini-figure or elaborate kit that existed in the US in the 70s but in reality, I never ever saw one and neither me nor any of my friends ever had anything besides basic bricks. It’s like there is some alternate 1970s Lego reality that other children must have lived. Or revisionist history.

I think there were jet packs in the 1970s, too. But I never knew anyone who owned one.

The 90s are when fancy sets with specialized pieces REALLY took off. The 90s space stuff compared with the 80s was a big shift.

But that's still 30 years ago so Lego has been fancy pieces and custom kits for a couple generations of kids now.

> But that's still 30 years ago so Lego has been fancy pieces and custom kits for a couple generations of kids now.

You can get a 790 piece big box of Lego brand plastic building blocks on Amazon for $35. These types of collections tend to end up in yard sells, or passed around extended families because they last longer than a single childhood. The none-fancy Lego branded blocks still exist, and are still a common part of childhood in America. Lego just doesn't have to market them as hard, and the sale volume is naturally lower.

Sure, and my young relatives do things basically the same as I did: have a stable of "common" bricks + a bunch of specialty models.

Then when you get bored with the specialty model as-it-is, the pieces go in the bins and you remix them with everything else :)

They push the sets pretty hard. I know someone who ran a toy shop, and Lego wouldn’t sell them plain brick packets unless they bought a certain number of expensive sets.

I think in 00s they didn’t abuse special pieces so much as they do now. Their sets looked more like “see what can be done with our pieces” rather than ”you have to buy this exact set because only it contains the pieces you need to build it”.

There are very sets that contains exclusives, and then usually minifigs, and you can also pick and buy individual pieces. But they are certainly leaning far more into the special pieces. That said, there even when I was buying LEGO sets for myself or begging for them for christmas and birthdays in the early 1980's, it was still on the basis on wanting a specific set because of how they made it look assembled, not for "just" the collection of bricks.

I agree it was mostly basic that early, but already by the 80's, LEGO ads were full of elaborate sets. Not nearly as elaborate as now, but certainly much more. The proportion of special pieces in each set were certainly much smaller, and made getting those special pieces a lot more exciting.

This [1] from LEGO Movie specifically plays on the 1980's space sets, for example, and I personally had quite a few of these [2] sets in the early 80's.

[1] https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/benny-s-space-squad-70841

[2] http://www.doubledumbassonyou.com/2016/02/19/lets-enjoy-a-lo...

Great! But the comment was about the 1970s.

Yes, but the comment above yours was not, and hence the discussion is not confined to just that. My point being that this changed a very long time ago. It's not 1970s vs now but 1970s and before vs the last 40 years.

> Notoriously Expensive Lego Prices Scale Linearly, Remain Constant Over Time

> If there’s one big gripe common among brickheads, it’s that the prices of LEGO sets are quite lofty (plus maybe not enough spaceships). But two disparate people interested in the plastique fantastique eschewed conjecture in favor of hard data, and found that LEGO prices scale linearly with piece count, and that on average, prices of sets have actually remained constant over the last couple of decades.

https://nerdist.com/article/notoriously-expensive-lego-price...

FWIW with some of the bigger sets they seemed to make it needlessly complex and tedious. You have to assemble little pointless pieces together that they could have easily delivered as one piece. If they really do charge per piece then it makes sense to me now.

They don't charge per piece. The price per piece is calculated backwards from the sets and number of pieces. Of course it correlates, but the price per piece varies significantly based on the size etc. of the pieces.

But LEGO has always favoured pieces that even when they look very specific usually have a significant level of reusability in other contexts. Hence "pointless" pieces that aren't actually pointless because their appearance is sufficiently generic.

"Can afford to" is rarely a reason to do so. There's still more profit in choosing not to. So there must be at least a contributing factor.

You're right that there are lots of elaborate and expensive sets, but the basics are still available.

E.g. you can still buy loose bricks from LEGO, so can make it as simple as you like. If you want basic stuff packaged up, the LEGO Classic line has sets starting very small that consists of a batch of bricks and a small set of themed special parts. On the UK site at least they also have more than 500 sets under 20 GBP/25 USD (you can search by price) including a number under 10 GBP / $12, but the majority of these sets will be full of special parts simply because there's little point in packaging up the same small selection of basic bricks in umpteen different sets.

Overall, the price per piece of LEGO varies greatly by set (average per category of set varies from less than 20 cents to nearly 2 dollars per piece) because of different weighting of types of pieces, but the inflation adjusted cost of the basic/cheapest pieces have remained consistently stable [1]

[1] https://brickinsights.com/statistics/ppp