The Pokémon Company and The Lego Company have revealed they will finally be collaborating on toys.
After sharing a teaser trailer on social media, The Pokémon Company shared this press release on their website:
“Today, the LEGO Group and The Pokémon Company International announced a new multi-year partnership that will bring LEGO® PokémonTM to fans for the first time from 2026.
Since the debut of the Pokémon franchise, fans have dreamed of becoming Pokémon Trainers, and now they can take that experience even further… one brick at a time. This new partnership will bring the world of Pokémon to life in entirely new ways, allowing fans to build beloved Pokémon in LEGO brick form.”
The press release also claims that both companies “have a long history of pushing the boundaries of social play, which is at the core of this partnership.” And it’s true that Pokémon did more to prod players to find fellow fans than other video games before it. Subsequently, Lego could enable players to work together, such as for especially challenging construction projects. But there’s something ironic in how they talk about each other today.
If you are one of those fans who grew up on Pokémon, you would know that this is the first time that the two companies are working together since the first games released on the Game Boy in 1996. That’s a solid 30 years before they started this. And we know, in fact, that The Pokémon Company chose to work with Lego’s competitors before this.
This all started in 2000, when Canadian toy company Mega Bloks launched Pokémon Build ‘n Battle. Interestingly, these sets gave you pieces so that you could choose to make a Pokémon or their evolved form. It also had a play pattern that encouraged players to have Poké Battles with others who also had toy sets.
Jumping forward to 2013, Japanese toy company (and onetime video game developer) Kawada introduced Pokémon Nanoblocks. These construction toy sets are smaller than Legos, making them both cheaper and more collectible. In 2014, US toy company Spinmaster introduced Ionix Pokémon, a short lived toyline with a strange gimmick. These toys are made of bricks, but some of the bricks can also shapeshift, like Transformers.
Finally, The Pokémon Company’s most long-lived brick toy partnership is Mega Construx Pokémon, later renamed to simply Mega Pokémon. At this point, Mega Bloks was a subsidiary of Mattel, and they made Pokémon construction toys of all types and sizes from 2017 to 2024.
One could say that The Pokémon Company proved a while back that they didn’t need to partner with Lego at all. But obviously, Lego’s fruitful collaboration with Nintendo, one of the three co-owners of The Pokémon Company, helped make this happen.
We certainly wonder if Lego Pokémon is going to do something that Mega Pokémon or other toylines hadn’t already explored yet. Would they have the same augmented reality features that Lego Super Mario has? Or did Lego and The Pokémon Company come up with their own unique idea, something that possibly plays around the idea of collecting and battling Pokémon? What if Lego Pokémon will help you complete your Pokémon GO collection, or play a real life game of Pokémon TCG with you? And what if Lego Pokémon are amiibo? And what if there are actual Lego Pokémon video games? There’s a lot of ways that this collaboration can go.
While we ponder the possibilities, you can watch the official teaser trailer below.
