emily

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!

even though this game was advertised, it never came to be. I would really like to know why, I know that there is a game breaking bug in Onua's stage that disallows you from progressing, but to me it just seems like an overlooked feature, i.e how deep you can go before you die, sort of over looked thing. But other than that, I really don't know why this game was never released, one of the many mysteries of BIONICLE and BIONICLE Games that may never truly be solved.

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.

Can anyone tell me does Greg still write for Bionicle?

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)

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!

I found this image on BS01...Anyone know where it came from?

 

http://biosector01.com/wiki/images/a/a0/Okoto_Fire_Region.jpg

Looks like it's from the BIONICLE VK page.

Who are Papu and Rangi supposed to be? Mata Nui's other brothers?

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).

Did the Toa lose some personality quirks in the new bios? I thought it said somewhere that Gali liked to make up puns, or that Pohatu had a slight fear of the dark?

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

They weren't there before, were they? I swear I've looked at those pages a dozen times and never seen these.

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

I just want to know where you got that krana sprite from. The only one I've seen is for the Krana Za.

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

epilepsy warning

Everything disappeared from the Products page. I hope that means they're updating the site. 

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.

Pereki, we've known for a long time that the original plan was to awaken Mata Nui at the end of 2001, but by the time of MOL the plan was to go to Metru Nui and continue a longer quest to do this after telling flashbacks there about how he fell asleep. That was the point of Takanuva illuminating the city, which would then be shown in the flashbacks next. And we had been told by that time that it was the Toa Mata/Nuva's destiny to awaken Mata Nui, not Takanuva. Finally, we know that the concept of awakening Mata Nui was going to be about the giant robot; that was planned from the start, too. MOL didn't have that.

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 most glaring example for me is all the "Mata Nui awakens this day" in Mask of Light... um, nope, sorry, not for another five years, guys... Was that even a retcon, or did the filmmakers really just not know that Mata Nui wasn't meant to wake up yet?

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.

That isn't always the case. Hapka depicted the Nui-Jaga as being similar in size to our world's scorpions, however I believe that the official canon size is much larger than that. 

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!

The disc doesn't specify anything about Lewa or Pohatu

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)

Image gallery here!

I've got three of these little guys and have decided to let two go. I can't decide which one to keep, so you guys can take your pick. Once two have been claimed, the last one won't be available anymore.

From what I understand these were part of a display at LEGOLAND. The torso, head, mask and disk elements are all finalized, but the arms lack some subtle numerical markings and feel like they are made of a different, more pliable plastic, while the legs have some added detail and some cuts into their bases.

All three have those stickers on their backs, I don't know entirely what they are for.

$70 a pop. First come, first serve!

Its an old fan theory, nothing to do with 'canon.' So no worries!

There were originally going to be six Mata and six Nuva levels... I think it was going to be canon too.

Nah, there's no way it ever would have been canon. It would've resembled the official story more, probably, but the actual levels we have in the final game probably wouldn't have been changed too much.

Did you program the sounds into the actual Flash animation or did you add them in in post-production?

That was post-production! I did them in Flash in the older ones and it was absolute heck to get things to work right.

What's happening, folks? I've got a bit of a new animation to share today. I've been working with the assets from Templar's BIONICLE stuff to make my own animations for a few years now (time really does fly, my gosh), and for this one I aimed for a distinct change of pace to match working in a new setting. I really wanted to bring out the characters here, focusing on what I'd like to think are subtleties in movement and behavior - the stuff where the real fun is at. This all in contrast to the more action-oriented stuff I have done previously.

This is really only a part of what I hope will be a longer animation that completes the story set up here, but I had to get this specific part done for a project and it turned out so nice I really wanted to share it.

(and if you want to see the other stuff I've done, go here - heads up that the earlier ones are pretty stinky, though)

I love feedback so don't hold back, type up a post!

But also whoever ate all the pies. It's been over a decade Lego, I still need to know!

That was apparently an actual thing British people would yell to heckle football players at matches. "Who ate all the pies? Who ate all the pies? YOU ate all the pies!" Basically saying they'd put on weight since last season or however it works.

It was the art director that threw in gags like that, Gordon Klimes.

Actually, we did. The Kanohi Nuva/Krana-kal packs could also contain silver versions of the nuva masks, representing the power drained version. I have a silver kanohi miru.

Right, but I'm pretty sure Lyichir meant the version of the drained masks that was shown in the comics specifically, half colored and half silver.