By Barry Kay (SAFOLs Brick Boss, CapeLUG EXCO, Batman … Ssshhhh!)
Coming home from school, doing homework (hopefully), and then heading to the living room or a friend’s house to load a cartridge and pick up that little black one button joystick to start playing your favourite pixelated game. Now we get to have those nostalgic memories come flooding back while building the LEGO® ICONS™ 10306 Atari 2600 set.
The set is designed by Chris McVeigh and contains 2,532 pieces. It is very well designed, and one would think it was the real console when looking at it from afar, with the lovely wooden look and feel to it.
The build is simpler than the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) so one must not be scared off by the 18+ age category. It’s a smooth, relaxing build with a lot of tile work, but doesn’t feel monotonous.
The Joystick base is a solid well-built unit and looks just like the real thing.
For extra nostalgia, we get to build three game cartridges that have stickers of the originals but with LEGO® imagery. I love the way they did the spaceship on the asteroid’s cartridge in Classic Space colours to look like the Galaxy Explorer. The cartridges are designed to fit into the console as the real ones did when you wanted to play the game. We also get to build a cartridge holder for them.
Each game has a small buildable scene to go along with it, which are quite enjoyable to build.
There is also a popup room scene with a minifigure playing on his console. I found this to be a lovely little surprise feature.
The completed build makes a wonderful display piece, with its many printed parts and realistic designs from the front panel knobs to the back connection points.
The only downfall of this set is the price. At R3,699.00, most of the people I have spoken to about only have it on their wish list. Apart from that, I highly recommend this as a fun and relaxing build for those who want a little bit of 80s on display, even if you were not around to have played with the actual console.
