Every city needs fuel to run, and prior to 1992, real-life oil companies like Shell, Esso, and Exxon provided the energy to keep brick-built LEGO cities running. Then, a new competitor entered the market — a Danish oil company that went by the name Octan. Soon, all the other players couldn’t keep up with Octan and that led to the dominance of a single supplier monopolizing the brick fuel market. Octan were not satisfied with just the ABS market, and it seems like the fictional gas company grew into a real-life company supplying gasoline to real-world vehicles… (HOLD ON RIGHT THERE!) Yes, you read that right… How did a fictional company become real?

Well, we’re not going to give you false hopes that we know exactly how a fictional oil brand came to exist in real life, but we just wanted to share a mysterious incident that popped up on the web. A screen capture appearing to show an Octan-branded gas station in the real world went viral within the LEGO fan community recently, and we decided to find out what we could. We may not have all the answers, at least for now, but we do hope that someone will step forward to give us some background and context.

Click here to read more about our investigation into the real life Octan oil company