It’s ‘craft week’ this week (kls and I are using the days off to do a lot of craft kits we have), and I decided it was a good time to build this:
It’s the LEGO Atari Video Computer System, or VCS (later renamed the 2600). This kit looks like a remarkable reproduction of the original console only in LEGO, and has a few play features as well.
An immediate nice touch is the retro-style manual. There were about 20 of bags of pieces inside the giant box but as with all LEGO kits these days the bags were all numbered and assembly was easy and a lot of fun. All told it took me about 6-7 hours over two days.
It’s very big! I haven’t checked but it feels about life-sized and once finished it’s much heavier than the NES I made a couple of years ago. It also looks wonderful:
The switches all move, and the two on the right have rubber bands attached to they bounce back up like on the original 2600! This version however has a surprise: you can slide the cover forwards to reveal a nostalgic diorama:
Here’s some detail:
Look at the little me playing 2600 back in 1982 🙂
The controller feels life sized and it astonishingly accurate. The stick even moves (and due to rubber bumpers returns to the vertical position):
And of course the cartridges can be slotted in and out of the console or stored in the little caddy that is part of the set:
And lastly the set includes three small dioramas based on the three included games. These are cute but I would have loved this set even without them:
Overall this is an amazing kit. It looks great, it was great fun to build, and it hit all the nostalgia buttons. The only possible negative is that it’s quite large and I’m not sure where to put it!
With an NES and now a 2600 reproduced in LEGO do you think they’ve got more planned? If I were to make a prediction, I’d guess a first generation Apple Macintosh may be in the cards for a LEGO kit one day…?