I have plenty of fond childhood memories of building things out of LEGO bricks with my family. Even in my adulthood, I find that I still enjoy building the occasional set - but it's a lot less freeform than I remember! I prefer to follow instructions and create what's laid out for me; I never had enough creativity or visual foresight to build incredible things from scratch without a guide.
Fortunately, there are plenty of people who exist out there who don't have my problem, and build incredible things out of LEGO on the regular. A LEGO and Zelda enthusiast named Ian Roosma decided to engage in some nostalgia by re-creating an entire The Legend of Zelda Hyrule map out of about 25,000 LEGO bricks.
“I was looking for something that had personal meaning to me,” said Roosma. He wanted the project to be “complicated” enough to take a long time to build and complete. Obviously, recreating the entirety of Zelda’s map using only Lego pieces seemed like the perfect project.
“Zelda on the NES is particularly nostalgic for me because it was the beginning of open-world games for me. The developer just drops the player off somewhere and you decide where you want to go and what you want to do, it’s the best type of game.”
Roosma didn't just have all of these LEGO pieces hanging out in his basement; he used a website made up of independent LEGO sellers called Bricklink to source all of the different pieces needed for the map. The map itself is in 3D, with actual dimension and variances in topography (ie, the rivers are lower than the surrounding land and trees, etc).
Here's the materials load-out of what went into just the trees on the map:
- 1,400 green cylinders
- 1,400 green cones
- 2,800 green round 1x1 to make the trees different heights
- 2,800 brown round 1x1 for the trunks
The map took him four months to design and build. The piece is 30 inches tall and 86 inches wide. Definitely check out the video above - it's a really cool build!
Are you a LEGO fan? What's the last thing you built out of them?