Looks like I owe a happy belated birthday to Lego, which turned 50.

Lego A/S, Europe’s largest toymaker, commemorated the 50th anniversary of its interlocking plastic building bricks by re-introducing a set from five decades ago.

The Town Plan set, which contains 1,000 blocks and costs 1,199 kroner ($237), went on sale today along with a hundred other new items on the Web site of the Billund, Denmark-based company. Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular Internet search engine, marked the occasion by using depictions of the bricks to spell its own name on its main Web site.

Lego, which estimates that children spend 5 billion hours a year playing with its bricks, was founded in 1932 as a maker of wooden toys. The company has made more than 400 billion of the plastic blocks since they were patented in 1958 by the father of current owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Its name comes from the first letters of the words “leg godt,” Danish for “play well.”

above quotations via Bloomberg