Via email, I interviewed Carl Merriam, Senior Designer at the LEGO Group. Carl has designed a number of LEGO sets over the years, including many other Nintendo LEGO sets, like the Mario & Yoshi one that I built and that sits on my desk to this day.
IGN: How did you get started designing sets at the LEGO Group?
Carl Merriam: I joined the LEGO Group in 2014 as a designer on LEGO Minecraft. I always say that working as a LEGO designer is beyond a dream for me, as I built with LEGO bricks my entire life. In college I started to photograph my work and put it online. I did some LEGO commission work for family and friends and a few promotional things for local business.
I found the AFOL (Adult Fans Of LEGO) community online and started to share my builds with them. I eventually made a portfolio of these photos and applied for a design position. I applied on a Friday. The following Monday I received an email from the LEGO Group: “Come to Denmark for a workshop in two weeks.” I went to the workshop and had a ton of fun building with LEGO bricks in Billund. Then a few weeks later I got a call with a job offer.
IGN: What other sets have you worked on before the LEGO Game Boy?
Carl Merriam: I have designed products for many different LEGO franchises including Super Mario, Minecraft, Mixels, Boost, Star Wars, Icons, Ideas and MINDSTORMS. The full list can be found here at Brickset.
IGN: Were you a fan of the Game Boy as a kid?
Carl Merriam: My older sister Julie got the first Nintendo Game Boy in our family and used to charge us a dollar an hour to play it. Eventually I got my own and played it like crazy. My favorite Game Boy game is The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Designing the LEGO version of that Game Pak made my heart skip a beat.
IGN: The lenticular screen pieces are very cool. Have those kinds of pieces ever been used in a LEGO set before?
Carl Merriam: The LEGO Harry Potter house banners from 2023 use the same kind of lenticular sheets, but we like to make new things with the same pieces.
IGN: How did you decide which games to include? Did they have to be first-party Nintendo games? Did you consider going with Tetris?
Carl Merriam: LEGO and Nintendo have a longstanding partnership, so we decided to celebrate these first-party games, as they were some of the first to be included in the Game Boy portfolio.
IGN: What's your favorite part about the LEGO Game Boy set?
Carl Merriam: The LEGO System is a language. The LEGO Game Boy is a poem written with LEGO Bricks.
I used all my powers as both a veteran LEGO designer and a lifelong LEGO fan to make this set as excellent as possible, so there are lots of favorite things to choose from. If I have to pick just one it’s the power switch. While working on this set, I focused on replicating all the haptics of the real Game Boy as closely as possible. I made all the buttons press-able and the dials turn-able, but getting that power switch to slide and click like the real one... that is my favorite feature.
IGN: Are there other video game-based LEGO sets you'd like to work on in the future?
Carl Merriam: I am a big fan of video games. I think the LEGO brick offers so many opportunities, which is why I have always been a fan of the format. While I cannot talk about anything that we are currently working on, it is safe to say that if it’s made of LEGO bricks, I am excited to build anything.
OpenAI’s Sora soars to No. 3 on the US App Store