emily

The graphic novel says that the Mask of Time in the new story is said to be only the upper half of a full mask, and that the place it is housed in (the Temple of Time) acts as a gateway between worlds or something like that. It also says the lower half of the mask is missing. As someone who isn't particularly interested in seeing the two generations connected, this reads to me a lot like they are screaming "the Vahi from the original story is the lower half of the mask!" But people are actually pretty divided about that being the case, so make of it what you will.

This site still exists. Maybe we can find him there? Don't try to contact Mark. Everyone has tried to contact Mark. If he were interested in reaching out to the community again, he would post something on BZP or another fan site. You wouldn't be able to reach him on Mask of Destiny anyway, he isn't there anymore.

The game is owned by a dude who goes by DeepBrick. He declined to share how he got the game, and in fact was so paranoid about LEGO 'finding' him that he only spoke through an emissary, Mark/Red Quark. Eventually people convinced DeepBrick to share some recordings of the game and Mark uploaded them to YouTube here.

I just did a google search for Ultimate Dume! Pretty simple, but usually you can find instructions that way.

Here you go! Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5

The Netflix page has 6 voice actors listed now.

Nice! This is fantastic to see. That trailer for the game that it shows has a bunch of footage from the scrapped Lewa level that we've never seen before, and I'm pretty sure images of standard (non-Nuva) Tahu and Kopaka shoes are new too - they certainly never made it to market! Really appreciate the time you put into sharing this!

The official reasons were timing and chip compatibility. Simply put Saffire (the devs) weren't able to deliver the game on-time - had it come out, it would have been in 2002 when the BIONICLE story and products had already moved on. As far as 'chip compatability' goes, the rumor is that the game only worked on very specific devices - how they managed to bungle that up is beyond me, but its not the strangest thing to happen. It would have been repairable I'm sure, but again, time was money. So rather than throw more money into manufacturing and distributing the game, LEGO decided to eat their losses - ultimately less costly than producing a game that wouldn't be bringing in too much revenue via other available products. MNOG was probably a factor - it had been an unexpected success and was able to fulfill the story end of the problem by showing how the PC game would have concluded (more or less). LEGO loved it so much that they even commissioned Templar to develop a retail version of the game (even though that, too, was basically shelved - only to surface when the game was rehosted on the BIONICLE site in 2006). The Onua bug isn't what caused the cancellation, but it is symptomatic of the problems that did.

There are no 'live' leads right now. Pretty much every one we've had has been killed by tons of people contacting them to the point they got overwhelmed/annoyed and dropped contact. It'd be nice to talk to DeepBrick again - there's a bunch of stuff comparable to the cancelled game that has slipped onto the internet. Some of it LEGO is even aware of, and they just don't care. The idea that LEGO's legal team would swoop down on him if he shared his copy is patently absurd - nobody cares about that game except for us. They just can't explicitly grant permission for him to upload it because they have to protect their IPs.

Nope! Ryder Windham does the books now, Merlin Mann did the screenplays for the webisodes. No info on who is doing the Netflix series.

BIONICLE.com videos haven't been viewable in Firefox for over a month now at least, so I don't think it is a problem they are aware of. The commercial itself is neat and is a nice swan song for the wonderful narrator, doing a few of the voices at least one more time before making way for Journey to One. (he'll probably do the summer commercial and maybe even the ones next year, but STILL)

Best piece of 2016!

Glad to see you back, Torsti! If I remember correctly a style guide similar to yours sold on eBay a while ago for about $300, so its worth might be somewhere in that ballpark. Excited to see the VHS!

Looks like it's from the BIONICLE VK page.

We'll probably never know because they would've been struck from the canon pretty fast after the lawsuit. That, or they were something that Templar added themselves for flavor and then had to remove for the same reason. Totally forgot to ask Templar about it when they were interacting with the community a few years ago! Based on how they're treated though, I wouldn't be surprised if they were an early incarnation of the Great Beings (who really only began to be developed in 2009. If the relationship between the Toa and Bohrok could shift from "share an evolutionary ancestor because they are both part of Mata-Nui" to "Av-Matoran turn into them" in the course of 6 years from 02 to 08, there's no telling what else might have evolved behind the scenes).

There are different copies of Nokama's text in the files for different instances when they are called (e.g. when you first save Ga-Koro, after you've given her the Po-Koro Chisel, etc.) and one of them was accidentally left with the "Papu and Rangi" mention that was supposed to be edited out after the Maori lawsuit. Jala mentions Papu and Rangi in the original text too, and it isn't edited out of the German version of the game. He says they named Ta-Koro as the place of fire (or something like that).

Yeah, they've been stripped down a bit. Kind of like the transition between the teaser and the full 2015 site.

They've been there! You must've just missed them.

It's from when they are throwing them into the Krana pit.

epilepsy warning

Add to this that trying to access any of the character pages redirects to the character index. Might see the update within a week or so! EDIT: the Mask of Creation game is gone too, as well as the City of the Mask Makers trailer and the first designer video in the videos section. And three of the Power Up videos.

Like a lot of modern LEGO themes (that modelled themselves on BIONICLE's approach), there was a plan for running the story for a single year, and simultaneously a plan to continue longer. They weren't separately conceived plans at different times. We don't know what the original "long-running line" plan looked like. We do know from a BZP interview with Bob that at the time of Mask of Light's production it involved 7 books, of which 2001-03 was only one - even if one of those books was the one-year 2004 interlude, that meant 19 years of story plotted out. And Greg's later account was a much smaller approach, with only the Mata Nui, Ignition, and "Toa Nuva returning" arcs (plus the Metru Nui interlude) on the table for a total of 10 years. Something obviously changed by the time Bob left the team after 2005. As such, there's nothing to say that the plan didn't involve returning to Takanuva and co after the Metru Nui interlude and pulling the Mata Nui reveal then, even though at that point we would have known they succeeded in awakening him for a year or two. They had wanted to bring BIONICLE to theaters in 2004, so they might've had hopes of pulling the big reveal to a wider audience in a hypothetical later film once BIONICLE was situated as a larger franchise. re: the story team not having full control of Mask of Light, absolutely! Lots of people had a piece of that pie. but if you seriously want to argue that the story team didn't get a say in something so critical as "whether or not to depict MATA NUI AWAKENING in the film," ESPECIALLY when two of them were heading the storywriting for the film, then we don't need to continue this line of discussion because I don't have much else to say.

The latter (see here). uhhhh, no? Bob Thompson, the head of the story team, worked closely with Henry Gilroy on the screenplay. And Bob was the executive producer. Heck, Alastair Swinnerton, another story team member, got a story credit on the film. Saying that the 'filmmakers' didn't check with the story team is absolutely absurd. They were the story team. The "Mata Nui awakening" was 100% intentional and 100% reconnected to enable the 2006-08 story arc. You say in the link there that Takanuva doesn't do anything that could've awakened Mata Nui, but it is pretty clear that is exactly what is going on in the last scene with the three virtues symbol on the floor and the beams of light. Like, Vakama says "let us awaken the Great Spirit" right before all of it. Just because they didn't fly over to Karda Nui or whatever doesn't mean it didn't count, because the story and universe were plotted out differently then. Just look at Faber's concept for the 2001 story ending and you'll see that the idea of a device to awaken the Great Spirit being guarded directly by the Mangaia was clearly in the story team's mind. Those weren't Nui-Jaga, though Greg incorrectly said they were in the sticker book. They were supposed to be Kofo-Jaga. They were still much smaller than they should have been, but it wasn't as egregious an error.

Sorry to say they're all taken up!

Pohatu's weakness was "can't swim" and Lewa's 'weakness' was "too many jokes", so they weren't all strictly tied to elements (see Onua and vision)