The Shadow Imperator

22 hours ago, scyther_grovyle said:

I really do hope we get all the different weird early materials. Like Toa bios from the back of the pens.

We have all six! I compiled a quick gallery here. You might also find the Quest for the Masks booklet to be of interest, as it contains bios from an early story bible.

@Daler99 Here you go

Pretty much all my early sets blew my young mind in some way. Lewa was my first buildable action figure ever, Pohatu had an upside down torso, Onua had a different head connection, Tahu was pretty standard but! I got to make Akamai with him, Gali had a transparent mask, and Kopaka had a cool system shield and the only asymmetric mask. Doesn't sound like much when I type it out but as my first introduction to the Technic building system I loved all the little differences and quirks the Toa had.

58 minutes ago, Evergrey: Toa of Music said:

I don't know anything about the rumor, but that makes sense! Especially since those games did focus on Takua, I wouldn't find it surprising if they had that concept on the backburner til 2003.

According to Alastair Swinnerton, yes. In one of our conversations he said he came up with the idea of Takua and the Seventh Toa at the same time. Also worth nothing is that he was a story consultant for the Quest for the Toa game, so he was very much involved in planning Takua's journey from the beginning.

3 hours ago, Laval- Master of Energy said:

On a separate note, was Tanma actually afflicted by Lime Joint Syndrome?

All sets from 2008-2010 were affected by the brittle socket redesign. Now as to whether that new design tended to break as quickly as the dreaded lime joints, I don't know.

On 2/22/2020 at 11:01 PM, Jaekoff said:

I also think the original Makuta set from 2003 is kind of badly designed, as a kid the front two gunmetal Toa Nuva chest pieces were constantly popping out, and the legs had 0 articulation and barely seemed to hold up the weight of the upper body.

I found the set disappointing for these reasons. I also didn't care for the big gap in his back between his upper and lower torso and his swivel function does little more than interfere with posing.

Similarly, I've never liked the Takanuva set. The katana pieces never seem to line up properly with the Ussanui is in flight mode, Takanuva's arms always pop off when I attach him to the vehicle, the voodoo ball is always falling off his back, and his weapon is kind of underwhelming and there's no way to hold it that doesn't look clunky with the Mata hands.

11 hours ago, Sir Keksalot said:

So this makes me wonder: where did the plants come from? They look like they evolved in an Earth-like ecosystem. Some even have fruits--organs specifically used by plants for reproductive purposes, which only works if animals eat them.

Some of the fruits have actually been depicted with Lego pieces, like the Bula Berry:

Vuata Maca Fruit in LoMN looks more like a glowing ball of energy than anything. As it does in Quest for the Toa:

In fact, this tree looks like it's made out of living metal rather than wood, doesn't it? In other words, Biodermis. So I think the idea with some of these "plants" is that they were either transplanted directly from the Matoran Universe (the villagers would of course want to bring their energy source to the surface), or possibly evolved from something that was originally inside it. The Vuata Maca trees seem to be a remnant of the concept that was mentioned by Christian Faber here: "It was the original intention that everything would have a bio-mec original design so no ordinary palm trees but only strange new species with new features." This wouldn't be the last time we missed out on a much more alien and unfamiliar biomechanical world in Bionicle. I think why we saw so many earthlike plants had more to do with out-of-universe reasons than lore-based ones. Designing environments takes a lot of time, especially if you're making it all up from scratch, and leaning too hard on the unfamiliar and strange might've alienated some potential buyers.

On 2/10/2020 at 2:18 PM, Sir Keksalot said:

Check the OP. "Matoro" means "to investigate" in Maori. "Mata" means "face." "Matoran" is probably derived from "Mata," or it is just a nonce word.

It's the former. In-universe the change to Matoran was because "the Tohunga realized they were one people." Before Matoran became the standard word, villagers were referred to as Onu-Koran, Le-Koran, etc., (later changed to Koronan, probably because it's not a good idea to have the name of the Islamic holy book in Bionicle), so there's a precedent for them being named after their homes. Along those lines, Matoran would be taken to mean "people of Mata Nui," named after their home/great spirit. The resemblance to Matoro is coincidental, the same way Maku has nothing to do with Makuta.

On 1/9/2020 at 8:39 AM, TuragaNuva said:

One little thing you might want to add:

It is on my list!

We also have a new juicy bit of info regarding MNOG, courtesy of JuniorMasterModelBuilder. It turns out the dialogue from the earliest version of the game was preserved on Wayback Machine:

Quote

I am Jala, Captain of the Guard, son of Lhii the Surfer, and I stand to Vakama's right when we have the Great Haka dance. It's my job to protect the city against the Rahi. I knew they were getting stronger, but no one in the city believed me... until the beasts overran the Tren Krom redoubt.

For obvious reasons this is quite a significant find. I'll have to dive into the implications of this in a later update.

4 minutes ago, Zidonaro said:

Also I woud really like to know what build of the game this image is from, It looks like it's from Ga-koro but it has onua in it.

I believe that's from the E3 build. Fun fact, the token placeholder is still in the alpha game files:

2 hours ago, Lenny7092 said:

To me, the Toa are just running for their lives to beat those time challenges by hopping on platforms. When you are done with Tahu, nothing happened because there is no Shadow Toa fight level or the Makuta fight level because they weren't included in the game as they were supposed to be before the celebration cutscene could happen. The game was incomplete. It's not how you would defeat a villain like Makuta. I mean, he doesn't get hurt when the Toa run away from him. Lol. 

As I said before, we have Makuta's dialogue and he literally says that completing the challenges will defeat him. We also have Greg stating that the Shadow Toa were intended for the game and from a game design standpoint they would have been easy to cobble together using the existing Toa models. But there's a good chance that they did have a true final fight planned originally, as the alpha version has a more fleshed-out final level with playable Kaita stages and an extra final room called "Kuta," both of which you can see in this video.

Quote

 

"You have come very far, bold Onua...

But your luck--and that of your fellow Toa--is about to run out!

I am but one form of Makuta. Your friends face the others as we speak!

Defeat my challenge and you defeat me...

Fail in your effort, and Mata Nui falls with you!

Aargh!! How could you defeat me!?

No matter--your friends will not be so lucky!

10 hours ago, Sir Kohran said:

Thanks for this. Do you know much about the challenge rooms?

Yeah, we have full access to them in the beta. They're very simple and mostly just test platforming abilities:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7XuZklB6ew

14 hours ago, Serpent of Fire said:

On 1/8/2020 at 11:11 PM, Xboxtravis said:

Speaking of Utah... one of the prototype Sand Tarakava's was sent to Saffire Studios in Utah as a reference model for the Legend of Mata Nui and Tales of the Tohunga games. It was allegedly handed as the trophy for a company bowling party in 2001... so yeah... somebody won a rare prototype Lego set in a bowling tournament. I wonder if they still have it 19 years later?

I am currently cringing at the thought of whoever won that Sand Tarakava set not knowing the value of what they have, and dismantling it for parts.

You can rest easy, because the employee who won it (Darvell Hunt) talked about this in the Litestone Discord server. He sold it on eBay to Mark Durham of Mask of Destiny. It's in very safe hands.

The whole "five Sand Tarakavas were sold to collectors" thing is a myth, by the way. I've yet to see a credible source for it.

15 hours ago, Night Terror said:

That was an interesting read, thanks for sharing all this hard work!

Thanks for taking the time to read it! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

2 hours ago, SPIRIT said:

Fascinating read.  20 years later and I'm still learning stuff.  People inside the Mata Nui robot?  Kaita switching names?  The reason they stopped calling it "biodermis"?  Just wild.

I've been aggressively on the lookout for more early Bionicle facts for the past two years (wow, it's really been awhile) and I still constantly find new stuff. Already I have 10 more things to add to a later document update. It never stops! 

On 12/14/2019 at 10:20 AM, Sir Kohran said:

It's been suggested that that image is from the game, but I have doubts about that because it looks like a shot from a cutscene and the game's three cutscenes don't include Makuta.

Do we know for sure that the game would've had the Makuta scene?

It wouldn't have been. It's pretty clear from the Makuta dialogue in the beta that the "fight" was little more than him tasking the Toa with clearing the six final challenge rooms. Peri emailed Templar about the image in question last year, and they confirmed that it was created by them for the Wall of History using LoMN assets as there was no existing imagery of the Makuta fight outside of MNOG itself. Also, we have Templar's recent blog posts to put to rest any doubts that they were the ones who created the Vortex Makuta concept.

A little while back, I released a document that went over story ideas for the first three years of Bionicle that were dropped, retconned or went unused as the theme developed, particularly those of story bible writer Alastair Swinnerton. I greatly appreciate all the feedback and comments that were made after the first release (including that BZP news feature!), which have inspired me to work with @Peri and @Mister N to uncover even more info and develop some theories about the plot elements and concepts discussed in the original doc. I've also expanded and rewritten existing sections for clarity and completeness. So without further ado, here is Version 2 of Original Bionicle Ideas:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NvpUPA8aOulNvSMq4kpX82bDbugJ2mbOL6cVfMXPNoc/edit?usp=sharing

The original iteration of the document is still up for posterity's sake. I don't anticipate doing another update of this magnitude, so all future revisions and updates will be made to Version 2.