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Carl Merriam has designed some of my favorite nostalgia-inducing Lego sets, including the Lego Nintendo Game Boy and Piranha Plant. He’s assisted on the incredible Lion Knights’ Castle, Galaxy Explorer, and Pirates of Barracuda Bay.
Now, he’s helped the company create a $200 Donkey Kong arcade machine set that managed to win even Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s favor — or so he’s told.
It doesn’t play quite like Donkey Kong, of course. Jumpman, the character that would be renamed Mario, can never reach the top under his own power. But like Lego’s $230 pinball machine, it does contain a basic fully functional game. There’s a working joystick to move Mario left and right a bit, and a button to make him leap. Throw a lever, and you’ll release one of an endless series of barrels for him to jump.
They’re the same original barrels that Lego released in 1989 for its first pirate sets, Merriam confirms, saying it’s his favorite thing about the set — and the biggest challenge was figuring out how to make them roll slowly enough without getting stuck. “I rolled thousands of barrels down those tracks to figure it out,” he tells The Verge.
I’ll share his full answer about how the mechanism works at the bottom of this post.
I’d heard that Nintendo actually works with Lego on its sets, and I was curious if Shigeru Miyamoto himself, the creator of Donkey Kong and Mario, might have been involved. Merriam says he hasn’t met Miyamoto yet — “but I did hear that he is very happy with the execution of this set.”
Nintendo did have one specific piece of feedback, Merriam says: “One small request was to make the poison barrels heavier than the regular ones, so we added Minifigure heads inside them.”
Theoretically, you could reunite Mario with damsel-in-distress Pauline (who has a lot more agency these days) by simply moving him with your fingers. Merriam confirms that the new Jumpman Lego element is detachable.
So, how does a single lever release endless barrels? I’ll let the designer speak for himself:
Q: How does the barrel mechanism work, and how many barrels fit inside of it at a time?
The barrel mechanism is essentially a pump. It uses a stack of 14 Barrels going up the side of the model. Each time the barrel lever is pulled, it adds one barrel to the bottom of the stack and one falls out the top. The system holds 20 barrels so there can be 6 barrels rolling down at a time.
Q: Do the barrels roll all the way down to the bottom? Do they fall out of the set, and need to be reinserted into the slot, or does the mechanism bring them back to the top?
The barrels roll all the way from the top to the bottom where they are collected in a hopper that is connected to the barrel pump. This forms an infinite barrel loop which is, by definition, “barrels of fun”.
Q: What was the biggest hurdle in designing and testing that mechanism?
The biggest challenge was getting the barrels to roll down slowly without stopping or getting stuck. This was achieved through a combination of rolling over steps, LEGO studs, slopes, bows and using LEGO Technic beams which are slightly thinner than LEGO Bricks. This allowed us to capture the feeling of the gameplay where the barrel rolls down slowly. I rolled thousands of barrels down those tracks to figure it out… Those barrels drove me bananas!
The second biggest hurdle was finding a way to get the barrel from the bottom to the top again. We built all kinds of stuff; things to shoot one barrel from the bottom to the top, worm gears, force multiplication levers, and more. But it turned the right answer was simply a lot more barrels.
Q: How do the joystick and button make Jumpman/Mario move?
The joystick moves Jumpman from left to right using a long lever up the back of the model, connected to a dingler. The jump button uses a similar mechanism used in a piano key. When it is pressed down in front of the model, the other end of a see-saw lever presses up on a long rod with Jumpman at the top. When the button is released gravity returns Jumpman to the bottom.
The Lego Donkey Kong arcade cabinet set will release August 1st for $200, $270 CAD, £150, €170, or $280 AUD.
Update, July 22nd: Added more prices and official links.
