The Rise of BrickLink

January 31, 2022 0 By Brian Crecente

The LEGO Group announced in January that it was officially retiring its long-lived LEGO® Digital Designer for fans, replacing it with the fan-empowered digital LEGO brick designer BrickLink Studio.

Why the LEGO Group decided to publicly retire its popular internal creation – now used in the creation of everything from LEGO brick sets to video games and movies – and instead rely on something built on a foundation of fan creation is a tale of two journeys going back decades.

A key transformative moment in the life of the LEGO brick came in the early ‘90s when fans began to imagine what it would be like to create digital representations of the LEGO bricks and elements. With the digital brick, there would be no limits to what a person could build, be it a LEGO brick model, a movie or television show created entirely of bricks or even video games that breathe life into the toy.

That concept of the digital brick started in Switzerland when a man who went by the name of Dent-De-Lion Du Midi convinced a group of friends to band together and work on a proof-of-concept video that would show what a digital LEGO brick would look like and how it would behave on-screen. That nearly four-minute video – actually titled The LEGO Movie – became a pitch to the LEGO Group for a research project aimed at digitizing the brick and bringing it to games, movies, and future technology that could blend the digital and physical.

Dandi, as he was known to his friends, got the ball rolling in 1993, won over the LEGO Group in 1995, and helped launch Strategic Product Unit Darwin in 1996.

Among SPU Darwin’s four divisions was the L3D group, which focused on building a database of LEGO bricks. But the division simply couldn’t digitize the company’s bricks at a reasonable speed. Creating just two to three digital bricks could take an entire day.

While SPU Darwin was struggling to meet expectations, another division within the LEGO Group – LEGO Media International – started playing around with another take on the digital brick. Specifically, LMI executive producer Rob Smith said he and a team working on video game concepts for the LEGO Group decided to take their own stab at digitizing the LEGO brick in 1996.

The first product to come out of that idea was LEGO Creator, a sandbox-building game developed by Superscape and launched on Nov. 11, 1998. The following year, as the LEGO Group struggled with flattening sales and rising operating costs, SPU Darwin was shut down.

Eventually, that project was handed over to another developer – Qube Software – which turned the game into a tool.

The original LEGO Digital Designer hit the LEGO website in July 2003 as a standalone downloadable program that felt more like an experiment than fully backed piece of official LEGO Group software.

Over the following year, the Qube team continued to upgrade and iterate on the program, adding things like online support for creation sharing. By September 2004, LEGO Digital Designer had been downloaded more than a million times.

On August 29, 2005, the LEGO Group announced that, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of its System in Play, it was launching LEGO Factory. Powered by LEGO Digital Designer, LEGO Factory allowed anyone to design a 3D model with digital bricks, and then order the model and have it shipped to their home.

The program was renamed LEGO Design byMe in 2009 and then was shut down in 2012. By then, support of LEGO Digital Designer had been brought in-house. As the fan base for LEGO Digital Designer continued to grow among customers, it also found a fan base internally, among designers.

Soon, the developers behind LDD had created specialized versions for LEGOLAND®, set creators, video game developers, and even Hollywood – eventually those were all combined into LDD Pro. But as support for LDD grew for internal use, support of LDD Fan diminished.

Today, LDD Pro is the only version of LEGO Digital Designer supported by the LEGO Group. Back when the company started creating spinoffs of LDD, the core version was renamed LDD Fan, but LDD Fan stopped getting official support in 2016. Despite that, one more update hit in 2019, but no more are expected.

The journey for fans and unofficial tools for digital LEGO bricks also started in the ‘90s and – of course – also with a fan.

Back in 1995, around the same time that Dandi was visiting the LEGO headquarters in Billund, Denmark to pitch the creation of the digital brick, a young Australian man named James Jessiman was struggling with some of the same ideas.

In 1995, he created LDraw, an open standard for use with CAD programs that can be used to create virtual LEGO models and scenes. He shared it with anyone interested for free. James spent the next two years supporting LDraw and using the software to create brick models for anyone who asked.

Then on July 25, 1997, James died unexpectedly of influenza, shortly after his 26th birthday. The growing community of LDraw fans came together after his death to create a website to document and continue James’ work with LDraw.

In 2000, another fan creation came to life: BrickBay, soon to be renamed BrickLink. The site was created by Dan Jezek as a way to sell loose LEGO bricks and elements to supplement his income.

Over the next 10 years, the site continued to grow, attracting a huge audience of adult fans of LEGO bricks and adding support for anyone to create a digital store and sell their own LEGO elements and bricks online.

Then, on Sept. 24, 2010, Dan unexpectedly died, leaving his family heartbroken. But his mother, Eliska Jezkova, knew she and Larry Hawthorne, Dan’s stepdad, had to continue Dan’s legacy and ensure that Bricklink wouldn’t just survive in his name, but thrive.

In 2013, Jezkova announced she was selling the site to Jung-ju “Jay” Kim, founder of Nexon. Over those three years, the site jumped from 50 million visitors to 144 million.

Kim promised to continue to support and build out the site. Then, in 2016, BrickLink rolled out the biggest change to come to the website: Stud.IO, a robust LEGO digital building program built on the bones of fan creation LDraw.

These two storied histories – both starting in the mid-‘90s and continuing through today – came together in January when the LEGO Group announced that BrickLink Studio would replace LEGO Digital Designer as the official public virtual LEGO building software.

While LEGO Digital Designer will still function, it will no longer be available to download, and the LEGO Group is encouraging fans to download and switch over to BrickLink Studio, which can import LDD files.

From the beginning, the LEGO Group was focused on making a digital building tool that would be accessible for children using a LEGO brick simulation. While the early fan community work remains impressive, it always seemed more focused on the adult fan community.

Of course, there were several other, lesser issues including the consistency of fan-created tools, quality control, the need for the company to have some semblance of control over a tool so important to its digital future, as well as the issue of the LEGO Group having to protect the intellectual property rights of the bricks, the technology for simulating them on a screen, and how one would transfer them online.

Jezkova, who remains a passionate ambassador of BrickLink, Studio, and adult fans of LEGO bricks, said the decision to not just embrace the fan community that her son created, but also work alongside it, is a reminder of her son’s lasting legacy.

“I lost my child,” she said, “but I got a million of these kids around the world, a lot like a Mother Goose.”