Welcome as we revisit New Hashima takeover week at BrickNerd! We will be exploring the gigantic cyberpunk city collab built by more than 60 people at Brickworld Chicago 2023. Today’s guest article is by Stefan Formentano (with help from Simon Liu) who led the charge to build this incredible LEGO display and community.

It All Started With A Photo

In 2013 I saw a photo:

Little did I know this would change the direction of my hobby and LEGO life forever. As a self-professed Grey Castle fan, seeing BroLUG’s Cyber City blew my mind and shattered what I thought was even possible with LEGO. It fundamentally changed my building trajectory as I knew from that moment I wanted to build my own Cyber City someday.

It took almost six years and a bit of a career change to get me started building what would eventually become New Hashima. I knew from the get-go that this had to be a collaborative effort—after seeing what BroLUG had accomplished with what at the time seemed like a large group of builders, there was no other choice but to assemble a team to accomplish my vision.

In 2019, I set out to build the first attempt at my Cyberpunk Mega City along with my local Magic City LUG (Birmingham, AL). But being my first time trying to run anything like this, I knew there would be people who needed a primer or a set standard to help my would-be collaborators understand my vision after seeing that city six long years ago. There were definitely a few challenges that I knew had to be overcome:

Cyberpunk isn’t exactly the most popular of themes to build in, and I knew my LUG mates were going to need some background on how to build in the style.
I needed to establish a build standard for my team to use. Fortunately, BroLUG had already done the hard part for me by designing the cube. I just needed to dissect every picture I could find. I dug DEEP into the internet to find every reference photo possible.
I also needed a way to ensure my cyberpunk collab lived up to the quality of its predecessor. A way to develop any builder crazy enough to join me as a cyber-psycho.

Cyberpunk Manifesto

I began work on the “MCLUG Cyberpunk Collaborative Overview Document.” I gave background on the genre, developed build standards for roads, sidewalks, and vehicles, and gave details on how the minifigs inhabitants living in our world would feel. Like the BroLUG team before us, this city was going to be truly our own. With the document in hand, I went with my LUG and got a large number of collaborators willing to see my insane vision realized including the one and only Peter Bradberry.

It only takes two to dance, and dance we did with a humble start of our city displayed at my local show, Brickfair Alabama 2020:

BrickFair Alabama 2020

But with this, and the reactions it received from the con attendees amping us up, Peter and I knew there was going to be more. This show also proved that the standards worked and could be scaled up. There was no limit in my mind to how far you could take it with a group of people willing to work together. The Cubes were strong and durable, the roads were critical in making it feel like a real city, and walkways connecting everything together made it feel populated.

BrickFair Alabama 2021 was going to have a bigger, better, crazier Cyberpunk MEGA City.

Let’s Go Bigger

But then my world changed a second time. The Pandemic happened. DUN DUN DUN.

BrickFair Alabama 2021 was canceled, and I started working fully remotely. I had a lot of extra free time which meant BUILD FEST. And as fate might have it, even without a convention to display at, we would have a perfect test bed to assemble the larger city. My local science museum, the McWane Center, reached out and wanted my LUG to do a summer-long display.

THIS WAS MY CHANCE. Fate had changed my course again, and this was a build I could double down on. Peter was also fully in to continue contributing, and we planned to build it out even crazier this time. We went from 4x4 to 8x8 baseplates, quadrupling the size of the first iteration.

This was our second major testing ground: we weren’t allowed to power the display so there would be no lights for this version, so I focussed my energy on the infrastructure of the build. I experimented with more roads and different elevated heights.

It took us 10 hours over two days to set up, and we came away with some lessons learned on how to better approach assembling the city. We would need to pre-assemble as many components as possible to best use our setup time. This was just an elaborate test, right? I wasn’t happy yet with this version of the build. The final version would have to be assembled at BrickFair Alabama 2022, and we’d only have two days to do it. We also had a new challenge in regard to lighting the entire display the next time around.

Up to this point in my LEGO hobby I had been a fairly isolated builder (or at least I felt that way), and while I followed the blogs, and had seen a lot of the community through the internet, I wasn’t exactly active in it or even known outside of some castle builder circles. That changed after the museum show as the build started making the rounds, and people started noticing me and my build. I’d seen how nice the AFOL community was from afar, it was surprising to me how nice and welcoming they were to me… finally.

Enter another fateful moment when Nannan (whose collaborative builds I also admired from afar) commented on my photo, encouraging me to name and photograph the city:

At this point, I hadn’t actually named the city yet. It wasn’t the ‘final vision’ and I honestly didn’t really feel like it needed a name or fancy presentation. But Nannan (who eventually joined in) made some good points and convinced me to edit a proper photo and give it name:

New Hashima (端島) was born.

New Hashima, v1

With a new name and a new show in sight, New Hashima (端島) - Sector 08 needed an upgrade. The first time I displayed our 4x4 module at BrickFair Alabama, I missed World of Lights and didn’t get to see the city shining. I had been teaching myself to work with electronics specifically so I could light my city and follow in the footsteps of the BroLUG group who had incorporated insane amounts of unique lighting into their build. Similarly the museum version didn’t have our lights plugged in so I wouldn’t be able to see my vision lit up in the second iteration either. But I’d seen enough coverage of Brickworld Chicago and BrickFair VA to know that lights were a must for this next show.

I had spent a couple of years poking around various websites, reading how-to articles, and ordering parts and components so I could do silly things like this food dispenser.

With the new and improved lighted version of New Hashima, Peter and I were prepared for the big unveiling at BrickFair Alabama 2022—and we were very prepared for that one special golden hour with the lights out. We could finally see it and share it in all of its glory. And while I haven’t gone to many conventions, and I’m not one to brag about it… IT WAS AWESOME!

I had never seen the city fully lit up. I had never seen or heard the reactions from the crowd. They turned the lights off, and I began playing the Vangelis Bladerunner soundtrack after prompting from my old friend Drew who happened to be attending the show. I set my camera on a tripod to take pictures to share more of the build with the online community. When the lights went off, it was just mesmerizing.

Peter and I looked at the build, crowd, and each other and realized we had created something special. All those hours of hard work, all of the learning, all of the planning, the setup, the obsessing… It was worth it to see it shine in the dark convention hall. Years of work culminated in that hour. When the lights came back on, I knew we weren’t done yet. We had to share the city with more people.

BrickFair Alabama 2022

And with that, the fates changed our course again—more and more people started noticing and reaching out to me, from nice comments to the most fateful moment of them all: BroLUG, the original crew, who I admired so much that I had spent more than two years trying to emulate them, reached out to me and invited me to their tenth anniversary Cyber City build happening at BrickFair Virginia 2023.

I won’t say how I responded because I was so elated and this is a family-friendly site, but I felt like I had finally made it. All these people I looked up to thought I had built something worthy. And not only that, they wanted to work with ME to help accomplish THEIR dream build. But that was more than a year away, and BrickFair 2022 was coming up.

The Start of the Collab

Until this point, New Hashima was a two-man show. I had the crazy idea and Peter believed in it and joined in on the fun of realizing it. But with all this energy and all the good vibes coming our way, I felt I had something really special on my hands. I had always wanted to go to the fabled cons of Brickworld Chicago or BrickFair Virginia I had watched so many videos about, and I finally felt like I had something worthy of showing. I also had a bad case of imposter syndrome that my friend Simon had started beating out of me.

So it was obvious: I had to share New Hashima with new people. I had already decided to take it on the road, go to BrickFair Virginia 2022, and use some of my newfound connections to go even bigger. With Peter's input, I had been developing my standards document since the beginning. I also had the modular design so it was easy enough to open the collab up to a large group of collaborators which was always the intention.

I contacted Simon Liu and Mike Willhoit and asked them to join in on the BrickFair Virginia 2022 New Hashima display. I was coming anyway… why not do a collaborative cyberpunk city as a fun preamble to the anniversary build? We could give New Hashima a good send-off before breaking focus to help the BroLUG crew realize their anniversary build. Mike and Simon were up for it. Each of them built “Toppers” — the highest section of the city, and eight others signed up for “Cubes” — the foundation of the city and the backbone of the whole effort.

I don’t know what I was expecting, I had already set the city up three times now, but this was the most prolonged and complicated of all those setups, coming in at 40 hours of assembly over three setup days. BrickFair Alabama only had two setup days! This was the big leagues. I had brought even more lighting this time around, and there were additional stresses resulting from adding new cubes and toppers from the various contributors. We ate up all of the three allotted set-up days. This is where we started seeing the family come together—the time was tight, and Simon was a bro and always ensured I was fed and hydrated. I didn't have time to leave the MOC at all. My first foray into the larger world of LEGO conventions had to be perfect, and Simon had my back.

Again, the highlight has and always will be when the lights go off (or low in this case.) and New Hashima becomes the center of attention like a giant flame that the AFOL moths flock to. The reaction to the new version was unreal—we reached new (literal) heights with both Simon and Mike adding toppers, forcing me to build my section even higher to keep my highest tower crown.

Despite all of this, we didn’t win any awards at BrickFair Virginia, which felt somewhat appropriate as Simon explained the original BroLUG CyberCity struck out twice for awards at both Brickworld Chicago and BrickFair Virginia. But we did get quite a bit of praise and tokens of appreciation from the public and attendees. I was particularly honored to receive BrickNerd’s coveted golden “Nerd of Note” award. It meant so much to me to receive this special recognition and know that someone had noticed and recognized the effort that goes into a collab like New Hashima.

I knew again that this was special and clearly on par with some of the best builds and collaborative projects I had seen undertaken in the past. Where could we take it from here? The next build would have to be crazy, and we were going to need more builders. A LOT more. Luckily we had the guy that knows everybody with us already. It was time for Simon to do what he does best: build a community.

Simon Says: Out With The Old, In With The New Hashima!

For the third time, fate intervened when Simon stepped up and, like some sort of magic genie, made my dreams come true. If I was “Old Grey Castle,” he’s “New Bley Sci-Fi”—the perfect combo. While there were many designs and thoughts on what the 10-year BroLUG anniversary would look like (including several dedicated planning Discord servers), it was Simon’s push to throw it all out the window and quadruple down on MY city and transform New Hashima into OUR city as the official 10-year BroLUG anniversary build.

I had a vision for what New Hashima could become, but Simon knew who, how and where New Hashima could really flourish. The 2023 reunion build was meant to take place in BrickFair Virginia but Simon had other ideas. He wanted Brickworld Chicago. They had a great community and infrastructure there, and it would be the perfect spot for our vision of a massive New Hashima. Simon knew he could recruit the people if we just moved it to Chicago.

I was easy to convince since now I had seen what we accomplished at BrickFair Virginia and this was the other show on my bucket list (BrickCon in Seattle is still on my list. I’ll get there someday). I was sold. Simon got to work recruiting and reorganizing our Discord. He even convinced tons of folks who had never been to Brickworld to come. This was a chance for all of us to be part of something HUGE. New Hashima was going to quadruple in size, and we wanted YOU to build it with us!

Mike and Mason were with us at BrickFair Virginia and wanted to help lead the group. People started trickling into the discord Simon had organized for us to coordinate this herculean effort. The organization of this effort is truly an example of Simon’s collab experience over the years, all culminating into New Hashima. If we were going to build something this crazy, we would need every base covered, and he was on top of that with a Discord with meticulously planned channels breaking down brainstorming ideas, WIPs, inspiration for the individual sections, among other things. He created an Excel spreadsheet with intricate details on who was signed up and exactly what they were bringing, maps of the individual sections, special jersey order forms, sponsor details and asks—we had it all.

Slowly but surely, the team started working together to make New Hashima come to life. I was a newcomer to Chicago and big conventions in general, so I really didn’t appreciate the impossible feat that was happening under my watch: Simon and I managed to pull in builders from all different pockets of the community, groups that typically didn’t work with each other or had even directly competed with each other in the past were joined together for a singular purpose: to build our collective dream of New Hashima.

Let’s Go Stupidly Big

Even prior to BFVA, I had an idea of how we could go crazy and build New Hashima four times as big, using a hexagonal configuration (Simon note: I still argue it’s a triangle. Stefan Note: Bite me!) with three sectors that were each the size of the original Sector 08 (8x8 baseplate):

Simon and I agreed that this would be cool, but given that it took me almost three years to build Sector 08, building three more sectors approximately the same size was the height of hubris. But my genie Simon said: “Let’s just go with this. We could always scale it down, but if we don’t shoot for the moon, we’ll never get off the Earth.”

With that, we aimed for three more sectors—the triangular ‘Inner City’ would be mine with coordination help from Mason, Simon took one section and Mike would take the third. But to accomplish this wish, things couldn’t proceed as they historically had. New Hashima was always my baby, my idea, my collab, and my vision. If we were to grow this four times as big and have four times the builders, I knew I had to release control and trust Simon, Mike, Mason and my other collaborators to do their thing.

Letting go was hard. This was my dream, but I realized New Hashima was already bigger than myself. It wasn’t just going to be a bigger version of the build that Peter and I started; it was now THE BroLUG 10-year anniversary build. It was THE new build that brought this growing community together. This was going to be special. The fates were combining into this one beautiful MOC…

We started joking that YONHO: You Only New Hashima Once.

While this isn’t exactly true (there are New Hashima sectors popping up at different cons), the mentality was that we would give it all for this ONE show in Chicago. No expense was too great. No idea too outlandish, no swag idea too stupid. You Only New Hashima Once. #YONHO

One of the most interesting aspects and another shift of fate was how we introduced Simon’s Sector: 06 Docks. Having long talks with him walking down the beach, I knew he was super gungho about building cyberpunk and wanted a bit of a redemption arc as he never felt he had done that great of a job in the original BroLUG cybercity in 2013. But as we discussed what zone he could lead, he showed his character and took one for the team. New Hashima was about bringing the best of the best, and Simon could assemble a dream team within a dream team of great sci-fi builders. Instead of doing what he had dreamed of doing for ten years, he threw that idea away, put on his space helmet, and approached his section with generations of sci-fi building expertise.

He knew that to expand this build and, much like inviting different LUGs and builders, to really get to the next level of my New Hashima vision, we needed builders that weren’t necessarily into building cyberpunk yet. “Docks 06” was billed as more of a straightforward sci-fi sector. We knew that there were SO many sci-fi builders that didn’t fit the ‘cyberpunk’ vibe, but we could totally do a cyberpunk adjacent sci-fi sector and bring these legends into the fold.

Simon has been in the community long enough to know what gets people excited, and as much as cyberpunk excited ME, I knew it didn’t excite everyone. We knew we had to let them eat cake. Or specifically Space Cake.

So the Docks sector was the gateway drug into New Hashima to get the likes of sci-fi legends like Adrian Drake, Zach Clapsadle and Blake Foster. With a more generic sci-fi sector, these titans stepped up and added their SHIPs and general awesomeness that just really set the bar for New Hashima. A lot of us were appropriately intimidated. Blake Foster, in particular, was VERY excited for the Docks section, and from the first day, he dove into building for this sector (including missing some very important LUGbulk deadlines).

But he was instrumental to the entire New Hashima layout. He was the first non-leader who pumped out the builds and set the bar so high that everyone subsequently tried to match. His early contributions combined with allowing us to use his cargo container as a standard for the docks (Simon note: We should have made something simpler, but YONHO!) combined with his general concepts ended up peppering the rest of the build.

You also didn’t have to physically build LEGO to be part of this collab. We also had digital LEGO artists as part of the team, most notably Steven (Ghalad/Digitally Assembled), who built digitally and then animated his digital creations to become ads on our LED billboards. Every builder was welcome.

The Face of Determined Daemons

But even with a small army of builders creating the impossible and all barreling toward Brickworld Chicago, we were still missing something. What does every good team have? A mascot! Simon had envisioned having esports-style jerseys made for the collab, but we would need a name for the team and a logo to match. We went through a few ideas but ultimately landed on calling ourselves the New Hashima Daemons. For the logo we’d go with a cyberfied Oni demon mask. I took some concepts Simon had found online and commissioned a logo artist on Fiverr to make our concept come to life.

The logo and the jersey were meant as fun swag for participants to take home after the build, but they became more than that. Once we shared the logo in our Discord group, we started to feel more connected as a team. There was a spirit in the jersey and the logo that brought us closer and inspired us to work together on this collaborative effort with an intense enthusiasm.

Cam's Daemon patch

Finn's graffiti, based on Dan Ko's design.

Seeing the jerseys as everyone built in person was awe-inspiring. I've never felt like I’ve been on a better team of some of the best builders in the world. The logo inspired others who wanted to be part of the team. It inspired custom minifigures from EclipseGrafx. And it even inspired BrickNerd’s logo for this New Hashima takeover week.

True Collaboration - There Are Two Simons Now?

Most traditional collabs in the LEGO community have been very geographical in nature, usually in the form of a large integrated display where smaller builds come together, maybe with some predefined configuration to make the next piece seemingly fit perfectly with the next. More collabs like Ninjago City or those helmed by Eurobricks are challenging this approach, but each section in a typical collab is discrete and designed and built by one individual.

But what New Hashima did was different from a lot of collaborations before its time. First off, everyone was welcome. We needed tons of AFOLs from tons of LUGs to achieve what we had in mind. All you had to do to become a New Hashima Daemon was be crazy enough to raise your hand and be welcome to our feedback. People didn’t just build things that fit together but iterated and worked together on so much—there were free-flowing ideas and sharing of concepts constantly (seriously, the Discord server is a bit overwhelming at first glance). Some of these concepts were used everywhere within the build like Blake’s cargo containers or Luke’s Doggie mechs. People started helping to build New Hashima from every corner of the community, with Zach sending parts all over the world, Josh providing yellowed brick lots and sig figs builds, and people contributing unique parts and bulk from every corner of the globe.

If builders like Blake opened the door to true collaboration, Simon Leoff blew that door off its hinges. That’s Simon Leoff (aka Simon-MOCS aka Best Simon or Simon^2)… not to be confused with Simon Liu (aka Si-MOCs aka or Simon^0). Yes, there were now two Simons.

We had a lot of amazing examples of marvelous collaborations in this build, but none was as unpredictable as Simon and Simon working together. I had seen some of Simon^2’s work on Instagram including some fantastic little sketch concepts that he posted. I was very excited to try to get him on board, but talking to Simon^0 he was hesitant - Simon^2 was from Germany and was very unlikely to actually be able to travel to Chicago.

But in the end, his concepts were so good I just had to reach out to try and get him involved, and much to our surprise he was more than happy to contribute by allowing us to build any of his digital concepts. In fact he even decided to flush out some of Simon^0’s concepts on what the Docks would look like—specifically the so-called “Slopes” area. And while Simon^2, who was in school with exams, couldn’t make the trip to Chicago, he was very interested in contributing digital concepts… concepts that he had no intention of building himself but freely gave to others with little regard to cost or difficulty. But the true face of #YONHO reared its head. Simon^2 decided that New Hashima was such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that he’d build and ship a few things… and then maybe a few more things… then he very quickly decided that he’d just come.

… and bring the tallest tower of them all with him. YONHO!

But Simon^0 latched onto the concept of #TeamSimon to flesh out some of Simon^2s digital concept work into real-world LEGO bricks which, to my mind, was the most incredible display of true collaboration that I’ve seen. New Hashima broke many norms and barriers of typical LEGO collabs and I can’t wait to see how other groups hopefully carry on the torch.

In The End… Or The Beginning?

New Hashima was the wildest of rides at Brickworld Chicago. Setup started Monday evening in the hotel lobby two days before the exhibition hall opened… and it didn’t stop until 11:58 pm on Friday evening just a few hours before the public were let in the doors. We estimated among the 60 of us that helped with the assembly, we collectively clocked more than 1,000 hours building over those five days. A rough estimate revealed it took between 1 and 2 million parts to build New Hashima—our resident rocket scientist estimated there were half a million parts in the cube modules alone.

There are so many more parts of this build that we could get into—you’d better buckle up because we’re going to deep dive into a lot of them here on BrickNerd over the coming days. But for now I’ll just fast-forward to the end. After almost a month since New Hashima was built (and even though it existed for a mere 40 hours in its finished form), it is hard to process the end result after working for nearly four straight years on this project. Years of work culminated into a handful of days in a convention center—a handful of days that I’ll never forget that were totally worth it, spent with one of the best communities in the world.

I keep going back to those three wonderful hours during the World of Lights event where they turn off the lights (yeah, they gave us an extra hour to gaze at our creation). We sat around New Hashima like scouts around a bonfire, listening to music in a kumbaya moment. Not much was said—we didn’t have to. After all the work, all the organized chaos, all the pieces, all the countless hours, we could just FEEL the moment. We could feel that we were part of something special.

It was better than I could have possibly imagined. I had big dreams, huge wishes, and massive expectations—and the team and the Genie made it all come true and more. I never envisioned that all this could come together like that. I never imagined the countless details. I never envisioned our rally cry was going to be SPORTSBALLS (one of my absolute favorite cubes).

I couldn’t imagine the THREE giant SHIPs built into the city, all standing upright(!?) and pointing to the sky.

I couldn’t fathom FOUR different types of trains including a custom monorail, with the most complex train BURIED inside a building three and a half feet above the surface of the table.

I couldn’t have dreamed we’d resurrect BroLUG to build MY baby. Yet ten years later, a cybercity stood again.

But as incredibly mind-blowing as New Hashima was, I couldn’t have possibly grasped how it was less about the build or the awards, and 100% about the people. I had always envisioned New Hashima as a team effort, starting with the overview document I wrote at the beginning. Peter joined me and we set something in motion, but I had never really joined the greater AFOL community. I had seen glimpses of it from afar, admiring people like Simon and Carter for creating pieces of it. I had envisioned being part of that community, but I didn’t quite get it.

I get it now.

It was so appropriate that a legendary White Brick was secretly given to each of the four main collab leaders: Stefan, Simon, Mike and Mason. Instead of a meaningful micro build inside, they contained a simple slip of paper that said, “Maybe the real New Hashima was the friends you made along the way.” That empty white brick seemed like a metaphor for the entire collab—after all that effort, New Hashima as it existed at Brickworld Chicago is no more. But the New Hashima family will last a lifetime.

Read all about New Hashima on BrickNerd, including deep dives on NPU, color, music, lighting, cybertrains and more. Also, please enjoy this two-hour-long interview about New Hashima from Beyond the Brick:

Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published on July 17, 2023.

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