Happy 40th Birthday, Lego Minifigure

Lego’s been making building sets since the 1950s, but it wasn’t until 1978 that the company came up with the perfect plastic people to play in them. The Lego Minifigure was born in 1978 with a handful of designs. Forty years later, there are more than 8,000 littering kid’s floors, waiting to be stepped on.

Designed to stand four Lego bricks high, the Minifigure quickly began dictating the size and scale of Lego buildings and vehicles. However the minifigure that we know and love today was not the first design. Here are a few interesting ones along with some prototypes.