LEGO first released Star Wars construction sets in 1999.
The launch followed a licensing agreement between The LEGO Group and Lucasfilm. It connected LEGO’s brick-building system with characters, vehicles, and locations from the Star Wars universe. Early sets included recognizable spacecraft and characters from the original trilogy and The Phantom Menace.
LEGO Star Wars became a major long-running product line and expanded into sets for many eras of the franchise. The range eventually included tiny vehicle kits, large collector models, minifigures, playsets, and exclusive designs that were not simply scale copies of on-screen objects.
The line also led to video games, animated specials, and a large secondary collecting market. The 1999 launch is sometimes confused with LEGO’s later Star Wars video-game releases, but the construction-toy partnership began several years before the first LEGO Star Wars video game appeared.