Recreating the 2009 Prototypes

[CefasVan]

A while back, the 2009 prototype pictures leaked to the public.

Since I was 3D printing for a while back then, I decided to start modeling & printing the prototype parts and recreating the Prototypes as close as possible.

The rules I went by are:

1) Try to  be as accurate as possible, but some parts are cut-up so if it is too difficult I would try to either print or use the existing piece.

2) If I can use an official part but it needs to be in an unreleased color, try to do that.(I have been somewhat successful in altering Lego's colors for some pieces)

3) Use the right color for the pieces.

4) Sometimes you have to guess which part it could be, so with feedback from others I will just see what works & looks the best.

 

My first full on recreation, is the Prototype Skrall:

- Missing parts:

1) Yellow/Lime head(couldn't get one with the orders I placed

2) Red Hands because the socket is often breakable so I didn't want  to order possible broken hands.

3) Tube removed from Sword but if you look closely you can see in the the Leaked Pictures, that is my mistake.

4) Shield has a thin Symbol piece that can be  rotated, easier for printing but now you can close the shield fully.

5) Zamor Launcher was too difficult to cut the side off.

 

- Offical Lego but recolored:

- Avmatoran Limbs in Mata Red

- Barraki Takadox Armor in Black

- Barraki Kalmah Armor in Black(printed versions also created)

- Zamor Sphere in Trans-Red

 

Other elemental lords are on its way, and you can see one that is almost complete in the background of one of the pictures  

 

Edited October 10, 2025 by CefasVan

[(-Kopaka Toa of Ice-)]

Those spikes/sword on the shoulders look really great. But i think Lego decided they could have been too spiky. He also looks like a heavily modified version of white barraki Pridak's ball-jointed body. But on the weapon, you used a length 8 axle instead of 5. This unbalances a big longsword that goes partially forwards as well on a canister set. I know it is a prototype replica but the the weapon axle looks really wrong on your.
I have no intention of sounding mean or rude by any of this.

Edited October 13, 2025 by (-Kopaka Toa of Ice-)

[Lenny7092]

Good effort so far. Anyway, I see that you have pictures of the prototype sets! BioSector01 needs to be informed of this!

[Nato G]

6 hours ago, Lenny7092 said:

BioSector01 needs to be informed

I'm sure the folks behind BS01 have access to the same sources OP does (at least one of these images is listed on the Prototypes page already). Whether BS01 can legally repost any of the other images from the leaks is another matter.

On 10/10/2025 at 6:24 PM, CefasVan said:

I decided to start modeling & printing the prototype parts and recreating the Prototypes as close as possible.

This is an awesome start to the project! As much as I love the armour piece that was introduced with the final version of the Skrall, I really wish we'd officially gotten Kalmah and Takadox shells in black. 

It's also a shame the designers didn't keep the double-knee design they used for the legs of some of the prototype Glatorian sets. Making those characters a little less like basic humanoids would've gone a long way towards making them feel more distinct from the characters of past years. 

Edited October 14, 2025 by Nato G

[CefasVan]

Changed the axle on the longsword as mentioned above and now it has the accurate neck piece(2 pieces glued together in the leaked proto pictures)

 

Edited October 19, 2025 by CefasVan

[CefasVan]

On 10/14/2025 at 1:33 PM, Nato G said:

I'm sure the folks behind BS01 have access to the same sources OP does (at least one of these images is listed on the Prototypes page already). Whether BS01 can legally repost any of the other images from the leaks is another matter.

This is an awesome start to the project! As much as I love the armour piece that was introduced with the final version of the Skrall, I really wish we'd officially gotten Kalmah and Takadox shells in black. 

It's also a shame the designers didn't keep the double-knee design they used for the legs of some of the prototype Glatorian sets. Making those characters a little less like basic humanoids would've gone a long way towards making them feel more distinct from the characters of past years. 

The tiny/bad quality pictures are from the 2009 Assortment powerpoint, just like many of the Element Lord pictures are and Atakus & Tarduk proto's are from the Glatorian-thornax-game test video. I can't find the Vorox prototype either, which is also from that kind of video so it might indeed have something to do with copyright.

[Cheesy Mac n Cheese]

On 10/19/2025 at 6:00 AM, CefasVan said:

The tiny/bad quality pictures are from the 2009 Assortment powerpoint, just like many of the Element Lord pictures are and Atakus & Tarduk proto's are from the Glatorian-thornax-game test video. I can't find the Vorox prototype either, which is also from that kind of video so it might indeed have something to do with copyright.

Powerpoint? Element Lord images? What’s all this? I haven’t been keeping up with new BIONICLE info as much as I used to be. Were the Element Lords actually planned to have sets?

[Nato G]

11 hours ago, Cheesy Mac n Cheese said:

Powerpoint? Element Lord images? What’s all this? I haven’t been keeping up with new BIONICLE info as much as I used to be. 

Long-story short, earlier this year Christian Faber shared about 50 gigs of internal development content with Youtuber DuckBricks, who in turn shared that info with BS01 and the BioMedia project. This included a lot of prototype images, story briefs, early scripts, concepts, etc. 

In the end, it turned out there was a misunderstanding about what kind of information Faber was allowed to share, and Lego demanded that all of that info be deleted. BS01 ended up being allowed to keep the set prototype images up on the Prototypes page, but most of the rest of the leaks have been officially removed from where they were hosted. But someone involved leaked all of the info as a download that's still circulating today. 

11 hours ago, Cheesy Mac n Cheese said:

Were the Element Lords actually planned to have sets?

According to the fifth Bionicle treatment that Greg Farshtey revealed several years ago, the original planned sequel to The Legend Reborn would have featured Mata Nui and co. venturing out to the Valley of the Maze, where they would encounter Baterra, new Glatorian characters, and the six Element Lords. Based on context clues in some of the leaked story documents, it's believed that the Baterra would have been the small sets for 2010, and the new Glatorian and Element Lords would have been the two canister waves. 

However, I'm not aware of any prototypes for these sets being included in the leak, or anywhere else. The pivot to wrapping up the story in 2010 with the Stars happened pretty early. There was a broad outline written for a three-year arc, but no evidence that anything beyond 2009 made it to the prototyping stage. 

[kawaii kitty]

16 hours ago, Nato G said:

On 10/31/2025 at 6:37 AM, Cheesy Mac n Cheese said:

Powerpoint? Element Lord images? What’s all this? I haven’t been keeping up with new BIONICLE info as much as I used to be. 

Long-story short, earlier this year Christian Faber shared about 50 gigs of internal development content with Youtuber DuckBricks, who in turn shared that info with BS01 and the BioMedia project. This included a lot of prototype images, story briefs, early scripts, concepts, etc. 

 

same! i've always thought i followed it pretty well, but i completely missed this! i'm looikng through them now, and it's fascinating. 

[Cheesy Mac n Cheese]

On 10/31/2025 at 8:00 PM, Nato G said:

According to the fifth Bionicle treatment that Greg Farshtey revealed several years ago, the original planned sequel to The Legend Reborn would have featured Mata Nui and co. venturing out to the Valley of the Maze, where they would encounter Baterra, new Glatorian characters, and the six Element Lords. Based on context clues in some of the leaked story documents, it's believed that the Baterra would have been the small sets for 2010, and the new Glatorian and Element Lords would have been the two canister waves.

I wonder if Marendar would have been made at some point…maybe the third year.

[kawaii kitty]

1 hour ago, Cheesy Mac n Cheese said:

I wonder if Marendar would have been made at some point

he could have been a titan set for that year

[Nato G]

7 hours ago, Cheesy Mac n Cheese said:

I wonder if Marendar would have been made at some point…maybe the third year.

Unlikely. There's no mention of Marendar in any of the known leak sources. It seems like something Greg came up with himself. 

We know that 2009 was meant to be the start of a new trilogy. Year 1 being the Bara Magna story we got, year 2 being the Valley of the Maze, and year 3 being some adventures on Bota Magna followed by a return to Bara Magna for the final showdown against the Makuta robot. The wrap-up we got basically cuts out the Bota Magna side quest, changes some details, and skips straight to the Makuta fight. 

All of the loose plot threads we got after that point - the Golden-Skinned being, Marendar, the Red Star being a resurrection machine full of zombies, Velika being a secret Great Being - appears to be stuff that Greg made up as he went along (a technique he's admitted to plenty of times). 

[kawaii kitty]

2 hours ago, Nato G said:

It seems like something Greg came up with himself. 

since kazhani go a set (something greg made) and that greg was getting much more creative control around this time anyway, it's very possible that marendar and others could have sets.

[Lorentz]

On 11/5/2025 at 4:12 PM, kawaii kitty said:

since kazhani go a set (something greg made) and that greg was getting much more creative control around this time anyway, it's very possible that marendar and others could have sets.

Well you have to remember that pretty much every set is just something that the Set Designers randomly make up, then the Story Team decides who they are.

It's not like Greg told the set designers "hey can you please turn Karzahni into a set?"

Edited November 9, 2025 by Lorentz

[Liopleurodon]

Looks like that Atakus prototype has a black Jutlin! Pretty cool!

[CefasVan]

So I had a whole discussion on the Duckbricks Discord a month or so ago, and discovered something about the first 2009 powerpoint vs the second & third powerpoint of 2009: If you look at the numbering for the sets for the later-half of 2009, and look for the document with the name Sub IS09 that has the title 2HY, you will find that we were supposed to have 3 "main" new species: Agori, Glatorian and 2HY->links to a document saying  2HY are PraeToa.

This is what it says:

 

Sub-brand name for 2HY 2009

PRAETOA or PRETOA

Explanation:

This name takes its inspiration from the roman soldier called a Praetorian. Soldiers of a special force used by Roman Emperors.

Mata Nui could give this name to the group. He would call them and himself “pre Toa” or “what comes before Toa”. None of them are Toa or a hero yet but all have the potential, even the Skrall.

The second and third powerpoint are closer to each other in dates and that is where we see the more recognizable Glatorian Legends but with a couple of those Slides removed that were supposed to be for the Praetoa.

Looks like Bara Magna was supposed to have a new species that were the first prototype-characters that could become Toa but what we got in the end(and seen in the movie) is  that every Glatorian can have "toa powers" and Glatorian Legends is just a title.

Of course this was early development but the Agori and Glatorian were kind of final in the first powerpoint we see, so it feels like these 2 were supposed to be more different then all of them being just glatorian.

 

So no, the pictures of these prototypes are not Elemental Lords but maybe the idea came from that with how animal/alien they look.

 

 

[kawaii kitty]

where did you find these powerpoints?

[Lorentz]

On 12/4/2025 at 8:31 AM, kawaii kitty said:

where did you find these powerpoints?

Christian Faber gave Duckbricks a ton of old internal Bionicle files, who in turn leaked it to the whole world.

[kawaii kitty]

35 minutes ago, Lorentz said:

who in turn leaked it to the whole world.

i mean i get it, but...

[Lorentz]

But what?

[kawaii kitty]

not sure if it was a good idea to leak everything, and he probably should have considered the fallout of such a choice.

[Nato G]

On 1/8/2026 at 8:10 AM, Lorentz said:

Christian Faber gave Duckbricks a ton of old internal Bionicle files, who in turn leaked it to the whole world.

6 hours ago, kawaii kitty said:

not sure if it was a good idea to leak everything, and he probably should have considered the fallout of such a choice.

That's not exactly how it played out. He publicly released what he thought he was allowed to, but there were some misunderstandings/assumptions made about what was permitted to be shared, and Lego ultimately asked for it all to be taken down, a request he complied with.

He went into a lot more detail on his (former) Discord: 

Separate from the stuff he had started making public, he also shared access to the full folder Faber had given him with staff from community sites like BS01 and BMP. Sometime after Duckbricks took down what he'd already uploaded to YouTube, that entire folder began circulating as a torrent/ZIP. 

The prevailing theory is that it was someone from one of those other sites who downloaded the whole thing and began distributing it. There was certainly no incentive for Duckbricks or Faber to do it, as both were threatened with further legal action if the leaked information continued to be available.