In the early 80s, my parents went to garage sales and bought me tons of used Lego sets. None of the sets were anywhere near complete, and most of them didn't even come with a picture of the set they belonged to.<p>My parents just dumped everything into a large bin and gave me no instructions other than what the shape of the blocks themselves suggested. There were parts of cars, parts of airplanes, parts of castles and police stations and pirate ships.<p>So I made flying cars, pirate castles, police ships, and everything in between.<p>Later, when my parents could afford to buy me a brand-new Lego set for a special occasion, I wouldn't even try to build what was shown on the cover. All the new blocks would go into the bin with the old ones, and I'd mash them together to build crazy things.<p>I think those Lego blocks made me become a programmer.<p>These days, when I browse the Lego section at any large toy store, all I see are heavily customized ("licensed") sets that seriously restrict what you can build with them. The bow of a ship is no longer a jagged stack of rectangular blocks; it's a large, smooth, custom-molded piece that can't easily fit in anything but a ship. They look beautiful, like a nice iOS app, but they no longer inspire creativity like they used to. Instead of Minecraft, you get FarmVille.<p>I could still build a pirate-themed spaceport with that set, of course, if I had a lot of rectangular pieces. But most sets don't contain a lot of versatile, rectanguler pieces anymore. You need to buy a very large set for that.<p>So maybe that's part of the reason why we think Lego is getting more expensive. There have always been small, cheap sets and large, expensive sets. But unlike in the 80's, most of the small sets are no longer worth buying. They are so heavily themed and custom molded that the average kid can't do anything truly creative with them. Serious players are therefore forced to buy large, expensive sets. Because if you buy a 1000-piece pirate ship, maybe half of those pieces will still be useful when you later decide to build a nuclear missile silo.<p>Some time ago, I heard that you could just order a bag of generic blocks from Lego. I wonder if this is true, because if and when I have kids, I'd like to buy them that. Or maybe I'll just ask my parents if they still have my old bin of mismatched secondhand bricks.