Legendary game designer Hideo Kojima recently Tweeted pictures of LEGO recreations of one of the robot dinosaurs from Horizon: Zero Dawn.

If this seems strange to you, it really shouldn’t. Kojima is a well known LEGO fan. Looking at Twitter alone many of his pictures feature a LEGO set either as the main focus or just in the background.

His connection to Horizon: Zero Dawn is well documented too. His upcoming game, Death Stranding, uses Horizon: Zero Dawn’s game engine and both titles are PlayStation exclusives.

What makes the story even more interesting, especially for those of us in South Africa, is the origin of that LEGO set.

As LEGO does not own the licence to the game, and does not currently produce any official sets based on it, Kojima was recreating a fan build. That fan build in question originated right here in South Africa from the local LEGO fan Wayne de Beer.

We covered his story back in December. After de Beer posted his build on Facebook he was later contacted by the community manager from Horizon Zero Dawn developers Guerrilla Games, Jeroen Roding.

Roding requested the instructions for the robot (called a “Tallneck“) and, after the required pieces were collected, a version of the Tallneck was built and now stands in Amsterdam.

While we don’t know the details about how Kojima learned of the build and made his own, we do know now that a third version exists now, probably in Japan. From South Africa to Japan through Amsterdam, this local creation has had quite the journey.

We caught up with de Beer over email today to get his thoughts on the events. He told us:

It’s a crazy and amazing honour to have a legend like Hideo Kojima want and build one of my designs, its just awesome!

He also let us know that the publicly available instructions he said he was working on last time we spoke have been completed, and just need a few more rounds of edits before we get our hands on them. So everyone will have Tallnecks on their desks in the near future.

[Source – Dual Shockers