If you thought the pinnacle of building with LEGO according to the imagination was already reached with the life-sized road-worthy LEGO Bugatti Chiron, then you haven’t seen anything impressive yet. There’s a product idea on the LEGO Ideas platform that is generating lots of curiosity, and questions on hardware licensing.
You see, LEGO Ideas member Perifractic is giving the brick treatment to the current trend of reviving retro videogame consoles. Gaming fans may know of the “Classic” min-versions of the NES and SNES, and of Sega’s attempt to do the same with the Genesis, but Perfifractic is interested in an older, more best-selling, gaming system.
Perifractic was set on his path one day when he first saw a miniature Commodore 64 mockup made out of LEGO. Being aware of present-day emulation efforts for the C64 computer, he was inspired to go all-out in designing and building a functional LEGO Commodore.
Features intended by Perifractic on his project include a working sprung keyboard Power Functions power pack, LED lights and even a brick-built C64 motherboard with all the original’s chips installed. He even has variants of his product Idea in mind: one a full-mockup (that’ll be the most likely for set conversion), another being a brick casing for an original C64 motherboard and keyboard, and a third swapping the motherboard with a Raspberry Pi for emulation.
This is a fairly new submission on LEGO Ideas. One does wonder how, even if it gets 10K support, Perifractic’s “fully functional” design versions could see the light of day as an official LEGO set, as it is trying to copy a long-discontinued computer from a defunct company. At the least, only the full-brick toy mockup might get a pass, but only the future knows.