I can already hear the sound of Lego purists spitting out their tea, but he makes a great point – one thing that digital instructions have in their favour is that it’s impossible to miss a step, which is very easy to do when following them on paper. In fact, after a short while he said he preferred them to boring old paper instructions. He’d already had to wait patiently while the hefty Mario app was downloading, and once I’d found the batts, he then had to wait again while Mario himself performed an update.īut when we finally got going, he took to the digital instructions super quickly. My five-year-old son was on hand to do the assembling, and he was super keen to crack on with building by the point I was searching for AAAs. And then there was the fact that I had to hunt around for two AAA batteries to power Mario – again, a signal that this is very much not your usual Lego set. Lego has been experimenting with digital instructions for a while, but this is the first time I’ve seen a set without paper instructions at all. For a start, there are no instructions, since everything is done through the Lego Super Mario app.

rex from the mammoth Jurassic Park set as I write this – but I was taken aback when I opened up the Mario Starter Course. I’ve built plenty of Lego sets in my time – I’m looking at the giant T. I was sent the starter course, plus two expansions and the Fire Mario suit.

It’s only now that I’ve built the sets and played with them that I get what Nintendo and Lego have been aiming at. Although I’d done plenty of research before the interview, I still wasn’t sure exactly how these sets are meant to work by the time I spoke to Jonathan Bennink, and even his patient explanations didn’t really enlighten me all that much. I interviewed the lead designer of Lego Super Mario for Nintendo Life last week, and following that, Lego’s PR folks kindly sent me a sample of the Lego Super Mario range to try out for myself.

Digital mario lego