The concept of the Matoran living inside the giant Mata Nui robot has been the premise of the entire story since Day 0. Every concept of BIONICLE from the beginning (which they started planning as soon as 1999, I think) was based on that. -Gata Well, not necessarily. According to "Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry", back in the earliest stages (when it was still going by "Voodoo Heads" and similar names) the idea of the characters living inside a giant robot was not established. The giant robot as the "big story engine" was not adopted until summer of 1999 when ADVANCE joined the project. As an art director, Christian Faber introduced the concept of the Mata Nui robot based on his recent diagnosis with a benign brain tumor, and the medication he was taking to keep it from spreading. It was around this same time that the theme finally acquired the name BIONICLE (for "biological chronicle"). "Faber imagined the toy canisters as vials of medicine drifting toward the head of a giant, comatose robot that was infected with a virus. The medicine's active ingredient was an army of nano-size creatures that arrived in pill-shaped capsules, entered the titan's body, and fought to liberate it from the virus." (Page 154) So there were concepts for the Voodoo Heads product line (which would become BIONICLE) well before the Mata Nui robot was introduced as a driving force behind the story, but it had been established by the time the BIONICLE name was attached to it, and well before other integral ideas like the Polynesian-inspired lexicon and the Kanohi Masks of Power were introduced. ...So BIONICLE was designed around Faber's disease? That's... A bit morbid. That... makes a lot of sense now.