Lego might be the brick with a thousand uses but the company’s various partnerships, with Nintendo, Disney, Land Rover and pretty much anyone else who wants a licensed set, are more or less designed to suck money out of wallets and into Danish bank accounts.
It’s Ninty who has the most recent new set of constructible bricks for fans to marvel over — a new 2,064-piece Super Mario 64 Question Mark Block construction that a) looks like a Mario question mark block and b) conceals tiny little Mario 64 dioramas inside.
Any more questions, Nintendo?
Unlike other Nintendo sets from Lego, this one’s not a seriously detailed replica, nor does it have many interactive features. It’s just a large yellow block that contains reproductions of four iconic Super Mario 64 levels, that can be revealed or concealed depending on how you want to display the thing.
The levels themselves are really tiny, and include so-called microfigures of Mario, Peach, Yoshi and Lakitu that look like their namesakes if you squint a little. But at least they got Mario’s facial hair right. And you will obviously notice that someone at Lego was tasked with making sure that the number of pieces in this set ends in ’64’. Sure, it might be a coincidence, but since someone took the time to make sure that Lego’s Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket was made up of exactly 1,969 pieces (the year that particular mission was launched), that seems pretty unlikely.
The Super Mario 64 Question Mark Block set launches from 1 October this year, where it’ll cost $170 — or about R2,500 here at home.
