The biggest LEGO® castle ever is a love letter to a classic theme. Here, the design duo behind its battlements reveals some of its secrets...
Milan Madge: We looked closely at King’s Castle (6080), a Lion Knights set designed by Niels Milan Pedersen in 1984. We had done a survey to find out which of the various factions and sets people loved the most, and this was the hot one!
From there, we looked at our personal favorites and thought about which functions had excited us as kids, with the aim of including as many of those functions as possible.
Mike Psiaki: The castle that really inspired us both was Black Knight’s Castle (6086) from 1992. That was also done by Niels, who really was the castle guy back in the day! It has some great features, and the secret entrance in our set is a homage to the one in that set, even though it is designed quite differently. There’s a lot of stuff in that model that we’ve been inspired by, or just tried to directly replicate. We weren’t just inspired by LEGO castles, though. We researched real castles, just like Niels would have done in the past. Then we asked ourselves, “What could we make even more awesome now that wasn’t technically possible back then?”
Milan: One example of that is the drawbridge. In the old sets, they really worked, but they didn’t actually go across anything. The bigger scale of this castle has allowed us to bring in a moat, and make it more like the drawbridges you see on real castles.
Mike: Only French castles, right, Milan?
Milan: Mike’s been teasing me a lot about this, but, technically, he’s not wrong. We looked at castles in England, Wales and France from the 12th and 13th centuries to see how their gatehouses work and how they interact with everything around them. But those are all Norman castles, or, in other words, French.
Norman castles have the most interesting features in terms of hidden passageways and things that lend themselves so well to toys. I think that’s why the original LEGO Castle line was such a hit and why so many people have such fond memories of them, so it was logical to base this new set on those.
Mike: Some of our favorite old sets are the ones that include the outlaw Forest People, so we knew we wanted some hideouts for them. Milan made the tree – which was probably the first part of the set to be designed – and eventually, we ended up with a lot more Forest People hideouts than we’d anticipated! The entire basement is essentially dedicated to them.
In terms of what didn’t make it, the original vision for the set was to incorporate an entire village in front of the castle. But it quickly became clear that it would just be too massive, so now we’re giving you the castle, and you can design your own medieval town at home.
Mike: Sheep produce better wool! Joking aside, we had a discussion about the goat, but… Well, we’re not allowed to talk about future stuff!
Milan: This is where we had to bridge the gap between looking at actual castles and LEGO castles. Our initial designs had an inner and an outer courtyard with the market village in front, but, as Mike said, it made the set too large. So we scaled it back and focused on perfecting the inner keep.
Mike: One thing that we both love about the Black Knight’s Castle is how it was built up on a raised baseplate, so the courtyard sat six bricks higher than the surroundings. We really wanted to have this castle raised up and sitting on a piece of land, too. Both as a homage to that earlier set and to add a little bit of realism.
It didn’t take long to realise that, if we made that high ground big enough to include a massive courtyard, we would run out of bricks very quickly and have to make all of the towers short, or remove the back wall to compensate. So, we went for a much more compact, well-defended fortress rather than something huge and open.
But, of course, you can open the set up, so there is the potential to combine two of them and create an enormous inner courtyard. You would have a bit of work to fill in that space for yourself – making a ramp down, or building the inner ground level up – so I’m excited to see what people do.
Milan: You could even get three!
Mike: I don’t think there’s a number to stop at with this one. I think you just have to get as many as you have space for! There are a lot of universal pieces with which you could easily build more parts of the castle with different uses but the same design aesthetic. You could also build up a great defensive garrison. One set gives you quite a few Lion Knights, but you can always have more!
Milan: If I had to pick just one, it would be the drawbridge over a moat. It is a brand-new version of the classic LEGO drawbridge. I remember trying to build stuff like this as a kid and just not having enough grey bricks to do it.
Mike: We had to do a lot of engineering to get that drawbridge to work the way it does! It is based on real drawbridges we had seen, and to be able to get that functionality into the final model is incredibly satisfying. It’s such an authentic castle feature that has not been in a LEGO castle until now.
Milan: It’s a small thing, but it’s also worth mentioning that there are a couple of LEGO Technic™ snap holes on the sides of the castle, so that you can connect it to the modular castle sets from the 1980s. We don’t make a feature of it as such, but hopefully people will join it up with their old sets.
Milan: A lot of the structure is based on elements that were available in the 1980s, so building it does take you back to that time period. But there are also lots of little details that could only be done today. On the battlements, for example, the tops of the crenellations are all pieces made for LEGO DOTS picture frames. We’ve repurposed them for a different aesthetic.
Mike: There’s a new half-arch piece that we developed and use about thirty times in the model. You might not even spot that it’s new, because it seems like such an obvious, classic LEGO piece and it fits right in with everything else. But it’s three bricks tall, and basically a smaller version of the four-module half-arch. It allows us to build tighter doorways and adds a very nice aesthetic to a lot of the parts of the castle, but it’s also incredibly useful from a structural standpoint. It’s a great piece that we had lot of fun using in this model.
Mike: We don’t reveal personal Easter eggs. That destroys the point of the Easter egg. They have to be discovered. People have to work for those!
Milan: Yeah, we don’t want to give everything away. But I can say that there are shields dotted throughout the castle that reference old LEGO Castle factions. A couple of them are factions that we never actually made shields for. So, for some fans, that’s gonna be super exciting – getting a shield they may have been waiting 30 years for!
Mike: Brown frog? I’m not sure if it’s a frog… I’m not quite sure what that is, to be honest.
Milan: No one will ever claim responsibility.
