Painstakingly created five years ago throughout the summer of 2013, this is an updated photo shoot and video of my ambitious LEGOformers Ultra Hexacon and Tetragon to commemorate the five-year anniversary. I made a few small improvements in the design of the main robot Ultra Hexacon, and took newer images with my current Nikon D750.
These articulated creations were my most elaborate, ambitious, and difficult LEGOformers to date, whose complexity eclipsed that over previous and subsequent transforming game systems/accessories. Throughout the spring and summer of 2013, I worked a job that had fewer hours than other companies, and had a shorter commute time: this allowed me to focus a great deal of time and effort at creating these models. These were each built completely organically with trial and error, and without any digital assistance. In other words, I purchased the pieces I needed, and then built several mockups and demos before making final versions of each robot. Because of this, there are no instructions available, and I don’t have any clones of either Ultra Hexacon nor his scorpion controller Tetragon.
Ultra Hexacon – the game console – was the first and most difficult of my Nintendo 64 series. He’s much larger than his predecessors like the Game Boy and Game Gear, and has more articulation compared to previous ones as well. One of the most difficult obstacles in his construction was the addition of his head. An early idea was to have the head detach and transform into a Rumble Pak, akin to the Transformers Headmasters series. I eventually managed to conceal his head on rotating hinges in the upper shoulder area, albeit his head can’t turn sideways. His shoulder cannon turns into the game console’s power supply, and the ammo magazine doubles as the memory card for the controller. The name “Ultra Hexacon” makes reference to the original North American name for the Nintendo 64, which was called “Ultra 64” in 1996. “Hexacon” comes from the proper mathematical term for a a 64-sided polygon, known as the obscure “Hexacontatetragon” – this is also where the controller’s name “Tetragon” comes from. Transformed into their alt modes, both Ultra Hexacon and Tetragon are united as a gestalt called “Hexacontatetragon.”
Tetragon was never originally intended to be a scorpion; this was merely a last minute decision. From the beginning, Tetragon was supposed to be a smaller anthropomorphic robot, however after several days of attempts to create a functional design, I scrapped the idea and instead decided to make the controller transform into some kind of animal. Early ideas consisted of making Tetragon transform into a dinosaur-like creature as a reference to Turok the Dinosaur Hunter. I gave up with this idea and simply made it into a scorpion, as a result of experimenting with the hinges and joints of the Tetragon’s basic structure. The black cord for Tetragron to plug into the socket of Ultra Hexacon is actually a LEGO component: it’s a rare, elongated black rubber Technic hose piece which has been discontinued. This means that aside from the stickers I printed, every single piece of Ultra Hexacon and his accessories are 100% real LEGO pieces, and contain no extra modifications.
When released in August 2013, these creations were a huge hit on social media, but unfortunately I released these a few months before getting a smarthphone and joining Instagram, and at the time I was on a two-year hiatus from Twitter. This means the popularity of these creations were centralized to Facebook and Tumblr, and weren’t flaunted much elsewhere. They were however picked up by some aggregate sites and had articles published about them. I also entered this in a LEGO contest on the website Instructables, and won 1st place. I received a lot of backlash and negativity because I posted the photos by themselves on Instructables without any instructions to build: at the time, Instructables allowed users to upload artistic creations they built rather than giving step-by-step instructions, thus a lot of my 2012-2013 entries on my Instructables account are merely photo shoots of my LEGO creations, but no how-to-build guides. After the backlash, I decided to only submit subsequent Instructables entries with real tutorials and thorough step-by-step guides, rather than simply showing off what I built. From 2014 upwards, I made Instructables tutorials for my electronic LEGO creations, with such extreme details as illustrations of schematics as well as online links to purchase proper battery types.
With that said, these creations contain absolutely no instructions, as I’ve created each of these organically without the aid of digital assistance. Despite this fact, I receive tons of e-mails and messages requesting to provide instructions on how to build Ultra Hexacon or Tetragon. It’s a hard pill for my fans to swallow, but I rarely ever chronicle my LEGO models with instructions, as I make my creations the old fashioned way. Also, I would rather encourage people to be inspired by my work and build their own original creations, rather than copying my work verbatim.