After multiple waves of LEGO Sonic playsets, poor Dr. Robotnik must be getting pretty sick of the blue hedgehog and his pals smashing his ingenious machines. With an epic assist from builder Zane Houston, Robotnik is back with a towering LEGO spider mech guaranteed to stop the blue blur in his tracks. Revealed at Brickworld Chicago, where it was awarded Best Mecha Creation, Zane’s Eggscruciator mech was assembled over 7 months and hundreds of hours from many thousands of bricks (including three Rock Raider drills!). It’s an incredible accomplishment, not just for the character design, but for the pixel-perfect 16 bit terrain.

Zane started this journey with the mech’s glasses which ended up setting the scale for the mech. The massive moustache is perfectly over-the-top – the sort of egotistical egg-cess that Eggman is known for. I’m pretty sure the Doc nicked his windscreen from a cherry-red corvette. Even at this size, the mech sports very few exposed studs. Where possible, Zane achieves this by having the smooth side of bricks face outwards, relying less on SNOT bricks and tiles.

For Sonic’s first LEGO outing under the Ideas line, the designers used printed parts and stickers to achieve Genesis-era pixelated terrain, but Zane uses no such shortcuts. Instead he stacks thousands of plates on their sides for a perfect grassy fringe. The pixelated waterfall is sublime. For iconic Green Hill Zeone palm trees, Zane uses lime green windscreens for the fronds. This level of detail reminds of me of Rylie Howerter’s meticulous Animal Crossing terrain.

Zane graciously provided pics of the build process that reveal the Technic contortions used to keep the heavy character stable and upright while avoiding right angles. While the Eggscruciator mech walks on four legs, Zane shows that structurally only 3 of the legs are load bearing with Technic supports that run through the raised terrain.

I know Dr. Robotnik’s a bad guy, and smashing his machines is sort of your job, Sonic, but maybe let Eggman have this win. The Eggscruciator is too beautiful to send to the junk heap.