Hell Knight: transforms fluidly from a Nintendo 64 game cartridge of Castlevania, to mechanical Hell Knight enemy, and back! Thanks to the advent of Mixels ball and socket joints, I can make my LEGOformers much more articulated and compact. When in cartridge mode, this can fit snugly into the game slot of Ultra Hexacon: the transforming Nintendo 64. When Ultra Hexacon was first released, I created two transforming game cartridges to accompany it: Mecha Kong and Hot-Shot (Donkey Kong 64 and GoldenEye 007, respectively). However a third transforming game cartridge was built but never released: Link 2.0, who transformed into a gold cartridge of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Although Link 2.0 was completed, I ran into problems with applying his game label, which interfered with inserting his cartridge into Hexacon’s game slot. For some reason, his sticker kept peeling off when inserting the game, thus I omitted from the photo shoot due to time constraints. My idea was to eventually retool Link 2.0 to have better clearance for the game slot, but unfortunately I abandoned the project

In early 2016 I decided to pick up where I left off and complete Link 2.0 — however, with its new retooling and transformation cycle, it was impossible for me to have the creation made predominantly of metallic gold pieces, thus I was stuck with having the outer cartridge mainly with the traditional light grey. This meant I had no choice but to base this off a different Nintendo 64 title; after debating back and forth between using Castlevania 64 and Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (two of my favorite titles), I opted to build games of both — hence, the creation of its counterpart Robo Fett.

For making this model in particular, one of the toughest obstacles was making the arches on top of the cartridges: when transformed into robot mode, the arches are on the bottom of the feet, which make the robot have trouble standing up. To fix this, the robot’s legs have retractable toes built with hinge plates. The game’s labels were printed on glossy card stock paper and cut apart with scissors, then glued onto the outer tiles. During production of this model, I considered using the LEGO werewolf minifig’s head the robot’s head, which would make this a game cartridge of Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness. I couldn’t obtain the proper piece in time, thus I opted to use a knight helmet and just settled for making this robot based on the standard Castlevania villains.