A more interesting comparison would be to put the core themes of the 1990s (Castle, Pirates, Space, Town) against the modern popular themes (Ninjago, Creator, Star Wars, City). The old sets had less specialised parts and less colour variety, which allowed kids to combine sets from the same theme easily. The buildings (castles, fortresses, harbours) almost always had a big baseplate (flat or 3D). Minifigs were themed and textured, but weren't cartoonish with facial expressions.
Nowadays, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with Creator-style builds. You can probably build a new vehicle out of the same set, but combining different sets from the same theme is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings rarely have baseplates and feel very airy and unharmonic.
If you look at Lego Space during the 90s it is a long list of new versions (almost yearly) each with their own specialized parts.
Personally I don't feel like this narrative about a substantial shift in Lego sets fits with reality. To me it feel like people conflates it with the rise of licensed sets.
For what was a very small and cheap set at the time, you are getting 3 minifigs and a small building on a baseplate. The bulk of the parts are yellow- and white-coloured bricks for walls and architectural elements. There is a specialised yellow-coloured edge panel with a red brick texture, but it plays very nicely with the rest of the parts architecturally. You can easily combine this set with the bigger forts and harbours. The colours are compatible, the parts are compatible.
This is not certainly the case with modern Lego sets.
Weird ski bricks, seethrou chain saw, antenna, big arrowshaped structural piece, etc.
I'm not surprised the one you linked is from 91. Noone is disputing that the complexity rose from the 80s. But the complexity we are seeing now is not a new thing. It started in the 90s.
Some of the late Ice Planet (dunno the real name) space stuff from that same series, and some of the underwater exploration sets from IIRC about then or a year or two later, are specifically what I think of when I think "where did lego start to go wrong?" I kept getting them for Christmas and kept building and playing with them but the 80s (through very early 90s) themed sets were peak for those, IMO. I never did as much combining and modifying/expanding with those later sets as I did with earlier ones. I was still playing with the earlier ones and changing them to other things and combining them when I had those later sets, but the later ones could only really fit in if they could do it whole and as-is, that is, the earlier sets had to change to fit them, they couldn't really do the reverse.
... I don't think that era was especially complex, though, and in fact when I think about the worst sets from that era they were ones that were built with like half a dozen huge pieces for the bulk of the structure (there was some kind of Ice Base from that same series you linked that stands out, in particular).
Complex is the modern sets. Fiddly, even. Look at the size of a finished largish modern set (for kids, not one of the adult stick-it-on-a-shelf models), and its part count, and look at similar-sized sets from the 80s through, I dunno, maybe '95, and see what their part count was. The modern sets have so many itty bitty pieces. 500-something piece sets used to be really big when assembled.
The ski bricks are standard technic skis. The chain saw and is found in the entire series of kits. The arrow shape plate is a very common piece in all space kits back to the 1980, though the usually were grey or black. Often used for wings with hinged plates. I have literally dozens of those in my childhood lego collection. Antennas were on each an every space piece, though the thin and slender ones only started showing in the early 90ies. They’re still around.
Afaik, lego went through changes. They had period when then introduced a lot of special parts (I think nineties or so) and then period when they simplified again.
They introduced special parts at the height of popularity and money success. Simplified when they had money issues - simple parts are cheaper to manufacture. Now that they are popular again, they are having more special parts again, but still less then used to be.
The number of specialised parts is one thing I dislike about modern Lego sets. They do look great and have really smart building techniques, but I just want to build a brick house with my kids.
There is always Lego classic sets, and smaller creator houses do have a lot of regular bricks too. But it is a bit annoying once you amass a few sets from other lines.
Still, I'm glad they are in business. I will take whatever they do now Vs them going bust, which was a risk a decade or so ago (or maybe longer, I can't remember the details).
My brother and I got the first two grey castles in the 1980s (the first castle yellow; grey was a fairly new colour back then). Those castles mainly relied on fairly large castle wall pieces. At first, even as a kid, I felt that was cheating; we should have gotten bricks to assemble all those walls. Later I discovered what a boon they were, because they allowed me to rapidly design new and different castles. Sure, I couldn't build a spaceship out of them, but just exploring the space of all the possible castles you could build was amazing.
Some of these specialised pieces inspire creativity. Especially with spaceships.
But I do agree that many modern sets just invite you to build this one thing out of them. We did actually turn out Millennium Falcon into an X-Wing and a TIE-fighter once, but we did eventually turn them back into the Falcon. It feels more wrong than it used to to build something else.
I don't think we ever had the yellow castle, although I do remember that flag. And we definitely had a set with a horse in the style of the yellow castle. So either we did have the yellow castle but lost the instructions, or I knew someone who had it, or that flag also appears in another set.
But I really have no idea. It was a long time ago.
The reason those flags are so rare is because the grip of the 1x1 round brick at the bottom is much stronger than the strength of the flagpole so if you would remove it by pulling on the flag you'd break it.
So these commend ridiculous prices for small pieces of plastic (about 8 euros or so last I checked).
> Nowadays, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with Creator-style builds. You can probably build a new vehicle out of the same set, but combining different sets from the same theme is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings rarely have baseplates and feel very airy and unharmonic.
“Most” doesn’t feel right to me - my son’s mostly had City sets and they’re all repurposable, buildings use large flat pieces with configurable roads so it’s not quite as big but also allows more combinations than “large square”, etc. There are definitely specialty pieces but I’m skeptical that they’re that much more common given all of the pieces I had as a kid which were pretty specialized, too.
Honestly I think people also underrate how fun it is to add on to existing sets. This is harder to do with technic sets, but for the traditional block stuff it was easy enough to build the set to instructions and just keep building.
I've been doing more of this recently as I picked up some knock off mech based lego sets and adding more arms/building them more weapons/other things is fun way to make them look better.
> I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box [..]
In a box?!!
Our kids store piles of bricks on more or less every horizontal surface in their rooms.
> the elaborate sets
Our kids will always build each elaborate set once, according to the instructions, wait a day or three, then it's fair game to be cannibalized for their latest homespun supermegagiga-jet, -spaceship, -car or -house.
I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box, and built my own things later.