Congrats on 10,000 Supporters, Mojang!

2011/12/07

Okay, we get it. You have a passionate community who wants to see Minecraft themed LEGO sets. It just took three server outages to prove it to us, but yeah, we're listening. ;-) We never expected a project to meet the threshold this quickly while still in beta. It took our first launch, the Shinkai 6500, 420 days to reach 1,000 votes in Japan. Hayabusa took 57 days to 1,000. With the start of Mojang’s Minecraft CUUSOO project it took just 48 hours to get 10,000 worldwide. We admire your passion as a community first and foremost of Minecraft fans, and second as LEGO fans.

We’re also pleased with how Mojang and the builders behind the original fan-created Minecraft project, “koalaexpert” and “suparMacho,” worked together in a collaborative and giving spirit. It’s a great story, and our hats are off to you for that.

So, without further adieu, we congratulate you on achieving 10,000 supporters and officially advance this project to the Review phase.

What happens now?
This project moves from the Idea stage to the Review stage. A “LEGO Jury” composed of designers, product managers, and other key team members will examine the idea. We'll build concept models and determine if the concept meets our high standards for what it takes to be a LEGO product, including playability, safety, and fit with the LEGO brand.

This sounds obvious to you as a Minecraft fan (Minecraft blocks and LEGO bricks look similar, so of course it's a fit), but every LEGO product goes through a process like this and must meet the same standards.

The review is a 1-2 week process. When finished, we make a "go/no go" decision to develop and sell Minecraft LEGO products. We will inform you of our decision, and if green-lighted, this project goes into the longest phase of the project; the Development phase. During this time, LEGO model designers refine the product and develop it for release, we create the product materials (box, instructions, marketing), and get everything ready for a production run. This takes several months.

One more thing.
We know 1-2 weeks is a long time to wait, so we’ll try to work fast. Maybe not as fast as you were getting to 10,000, but we’ll see. We appreciate your enthusiastic support!

The LEGO CUUSOO Team