The VirtuaLUG Story
The humble beginings of VirtuaLUG can be traced as far back as Brickworld 2008 when a few members of VirtuaLUG first met each other in person and began to forge life-long friendships. Most communication in the "early days" was done on MOCPages and over e-mail. At first with only a small group of people, this worked quite well. Over the next thee years, more friends came into the group and the communication started to increase at an exponential rate. In a nutshell, the LUG was really born out of necessity. As the online chatter increased, members found themselves needing a dedicated place to meet/chat where they could also archive conversations and other infomation. A private forum was created to support this in late-2011. This was really the begining of the LUG in it's current form.
Once the forum was up and running smoothly, members began to talk about potentially forming an offical LUG to give the group a true identity. At BrickCon 2011, the members who were present made the decision that a "Virtual LEGO User Group" would be a great idea. With that, the name VirtuaLUG was born. As part of becoming "official", the LUG has regstered with The LEGO Group and now has this website as an official online presence. As our group is a very tight-knit group of friends, we continue to be an invitation-only LUG which is quite different from many of the other LUG's out there. Wrong or right...we feel it's the best decision for our group.
VirtuaLUG holds meetings/gatherings both online and at LEGO fan events all over the world. Our primary meeting event is Brickworld, which is held every June just outside of Chicago, IL. Other gatherings also occur throughout the year whenever multiple members are able to be in the same physical location. Online events include Skype meetings and other video chat sessions along with extensive use of our private forum.
