The Living Brick: Atari project reels in large followers overnight on ...

As a product of the same era that spawned this, I cannot tell you what joy it gave me to see these Lego renderings of my all time favorite Atari 2600 game "ADVENTURE" by atarifan401. They brought back happy blocky memories of a simpler time for videogaming. Ok, I'll admit it, I'm just too old to handle anything more sophisticated than Doom!

So imagine my further delight when - literally overnight - the Atari fan community rallied around this idea and got the necessary 10,000 votes on Lego's CUUSOO website to make this an actual real Lego set (...8-bit squeeee!). In fact, they totally blew past that number, levelling out nearer the 20k mark.

The Lego company didn't waste any time putting out a press release...

BILLUND Denmark - The gaming community does it again!

Barely three months after game developer Mojang inspired the Minecraft gaming community to provide the 10,000 votes needed to make a Minecraft LEGO set reality, another very different community of videogame enthusiasts has accomplished the same feat.

This time, it is a project inspired by the classic (and equally 'blocky') Atari 2600 game ADVENTURE that has become the second LEGO(r) CUUSOO project to qualify for product review since the site went global in 2011.

"Through an amazing grass-roots effort, members of the classic videogame fan site AtariAge.com were able to amass over twice the votes in half the time. We were totally taken by surprise. This is a pretty stunning achievment given that, unlike the Minecraft crowd, Atari fans are typically a much older demographic. We heard rumors of Atari fans visiting local retirement homes to try and track down anyone that could still remember this ground-breaking 1979 console game", says Narret Fisk, newly appointed head of LEGO's New Business Group. "Apparently a flurry of telegrams and faxes over the weekend tipped the balance, when one was read out on stage by mistake in front of several thousand attendees at a Buick owners convention. After that, we started seeing pretty heavy traffic on both our web servers and our new phone-based voting system. We had to call most of the CUUSOO staff back early from their Spring Break celebrations in Miami, which as you can imagine didn't go down too well!"

The cartridge-based Atari 2600 game console was launched in 1977 and gave rise to the very first generation of home videogamers. With limited processing power and only 4K of memory, games had to favor smart gameplay over flashy sound and graphics. The 2600 is widely regarded as the grandfather of modern consoles such as the XBox or Wii, while ADVENTURE is considered to have been the template for the immersive role-playing games of today, like Skyrim and Halo. At it's peak, ADVENTURE spawned a billion-dollar merchandising industry and even a 1982 blockbuster Hollywood movie, starring Jack Palance as The Hero.

Below is a screen cap taken by the set's creator shortly before heavy traffic temporarily took down the site. Big retro kudos to atarifan401 for coming up with such a great concept for a CuuSoo set. The detailing is spot on, and the colors are totally faithful to the original. I shall certainly be "inserting coins" into my local Lego store when this one comes out!

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