Bionicle Lost Media?

[Master Inika]

Has anyone ever studied/researched BIONICLE lost media?

On the Lost Media Wiki, there are some mentions of BIONICLE, but they are of projects canceled before they could be officially published at all (The Legend of Mata Nui video game and the Invasion book specifically). There is a quite interesting article on a 2003 Takanuva/Makuta commercial as well. It always seemed to me that there must be some lost BIONICLE commercials. Specifically around 2007/8, I felt like I frequently saw on TV short commercials made from bits and pieces of the longer animations, sometimes with different dialogue, but I might be misremembering.

The Rhotuka Spinner Challenge, an online game from 2005, is inaccessible even on formats like BlueMaxima's Flashpoint Archive because it was connected to LEGO.com to play with other users. (There was a LEGO tic-tac-toe online game that is lost for the same reason.) The BIONICLE community has always been pretty good about preserving its content, like through BioMedia Project and the Biological Chronicle. Hopefully, that will remain the case.

On a related note, has anyone ever observed that BIONICLE is the only LEGO line to have been officially divided into years on the website? I recall in 2006, the BIONICLE website kept much of its previous games divided by year (2003 had MNOG II, 2004 had Stop the Morbuzakh, and 2005 had the aforementioned Rhotuka Spinner Challenge). I think this is the only instance of LEGO recognizing the years of its production, to my knowledge the LEGO Ninjago or Star Wars sites never did this.

[TahnokTrapper]

Don't forget the never-completed comics. The only things ever released were the scripts:

https://bionicle.fandom.com/wiki/BIONICLE_2005_Web_Comics

https://bionicle.fandom.com/wiki/Comic_12.5

[Master Inika]

On 10/19/2023 at 2:45 PM, TahnokTrapper said:

Don't forget the never-completed comics. The only things ever released were the scripts:

https://bionicle.fandom.com/wiki/BIONICLE_2005_Web_Comics

https://bionicle.fandom.com/wiki/Comic_12.5

Maybe it's just me, but I draw a hard distinction between lost media and unpublished media.

For me, the lost media phenomenon happens when there's something you remember consuming as a child and, lo and behold, when you come back to revisit it, it's gone. For me, that applies to the Rhotuka Spinner Challenge, some old Goldfish commercials, and other things. I consider that different from doing research and discovering something meant for release that never was.

[TahnokTrapper]

On 10/20/2023 at 9:14 PM, Master Inika said:

Maybe it's just me, but I draw a hard distinction between lost media and unpublished media.

For me, the lost media phenomenon happens when there's something you remember consuming as a child and, lo and behold, when you come back to revisit it, it's gone. For me, that applies to the Rhotuka Spinner Challenge, some old Goldfish commercials, and other things. I consider that different from doing research and discovering something meant for release that never was.

I wouldn't draw hard line between them. Case in point: The Missing Coach, the lost season 2 episode of Tomas and Friends. Said episode can be classified as both lost and unreleased media, since the episode was never completed and the footage that was filmed was never fully released.

Going back on topic, I remember vaguely playing a game like the Rhotuka Spinner Challenge, but that was such a long time ago my memory is somewhat fuzzy.

[Aiden]

On 10/23/2023 at 9:18 AM, TahnokTrapper said:

Case in point: The Missing Coach, the lost season 2 episode of Tomas and Friends. Said episode can be classified as both lost and unreleased media, since the episode was never completed and the footage that was filmed was never fully released.

Ok but is there a way to watch what was finished of that Thomas episode 😏

[Lorentz]

I lost all of my Rahkshi and Bohrok-Kal CDs

[Chronicler06]

21 hours ago, Lorentz said:

I lost all of my Rahkshi and Bohrok-Kal CDs

While I never got any of those, I do recall once getting some mini CD with some other Bionicle set, though I don't know what happened to it. I also remember playing the mini games that (I think) came with entering the "Kanoka Code" that came with each of the Toa Metru, which involved finding and rescuing their respective Matoran. Does anyone know if those Toa Metru mini games have been saved somewhere?

[That Matoran with a Vahi]

17 hours ago, Chronicler06 said:

While I never got any of those, I do recall once getting some mini CD with some other Bionicle set, though I don't know what happened to it. I also remember playing the mini games that (I think) came with entering the "Kanoka Code" that came with each of the Toa Metru, which involved finding and rescuing their respective Matoran. Does anyone know if those Toa Metru mini games have been saved somewhere?

While those games were available online through the Kanoka club, like you say, they also were found on the mini-CDs that came with some releases of the Toa Metru: interestingly, when I checked one of mine out again a couple years ago, before selling a bunch of them to someone in B/S/T on here, and found to my surprise that it still ran on my modern Windows 10 laptop - even though many, many other PC games from that era don't.

Looks like they're on the BioMedia project, right here: https://biomediaproject.com/bmp/promo-cds/metru/ ^^