It's time to play THE SEQUEL TO MYST

that's right folks it's BIONICLE: MATA NUI ONLINE GAME

playing BIONICLE: MATA NUI ONLINE GAME in mind-blowing 4K ULTRA HD

realized I should probably do a thread on this before flash is killed off lmao

Okay so, context, for those of you who didn't hang out on lego dot com's flash games portal:

Mata Nui Online Game (henceforth MNOLG; I dunno why we capitalized the L but we did) was a tie-in flash game for Lego's then-new Bionicle line, which launched in spring of 2001

Bionicle, if you missed it, was Lego's first attempt at building a cross-media franchise: A series of lego sets that were action figures, with collectible accessories and a surprisingly elaborate plot+lore, told across a series of comic books and eventually games and movies

Bionicle was wildly successful (actually saving the lego company from near-bankruptcy)

Its success was almost entirely due to how good this third-party contracted advergame was. The developers went UNJUSTIFIABLY HARD on it, seemingly without Lego's full awareness

This game is... good?
Like, it's actually a good videogame

sure it's designed for 12 year olds but like, the art's incredibly expressive and it ended up establishing a really powerful tone that hooked an entire fanbase

MNOLG is legit a major reason I ended up making games lol

So this is what gameplay looks like

It's a Mystlike, but instead of prerendered images, every screen is its own unique artwork

You can pan the camera around a bit and there's cool parallax to give everything some depth

The art's kind of a mess in the starting area lol; the devs pretty quickly figured out what worked and what didn't

giant blurry dialup-friendly jpegs of sand quickly went in the "doesn't work" pile lol

that said, whoever had the Paint An Entire Videogame's Worth of Rocks With Vector Outlines job was in top form pretty much from the beginning

look at that good-ass rock pillar

Notably: this game was released in installments over the course of like a year and a half

Initially this beach area was the only place you could access. A month later, they made an update and a route opened up to get to the Cool Fire Zone with the Cool Red Guy lives

Also this little dude, who is teaching himself how to teleport by walking slowly

he rules

Fun fact: This game is super racist!

So basically, almost all of the names/Fantasy Nouns are lifted from the actual IRL Maori language

This was 2001 so like the height of that weird "tribal" aesthetic that everyone was into for some reason

lego decided to just sort of stripmine IRL Polynesian culture for exotic flavor to add to it's Tribal Robots fantasy setting

A bunch of Maori folks ended up suing Lego over it, and they ended up having to rename a bunch of the more egregiously appropriated words

This game released before that happened though, so all the names are the old versions

Notably "Tohunga" was the name for the cute robot villagers, but apparently that word has like actual religious significance

"Jala" (in that screenshot) was another one that got renamed later

They had to devise some kind of in-lore justification for this and ended up inventing a big ceremony where a bunch of characters were recognized for their heroism and given uhhhhhh less racist names lol

also the new names were all awful bc they tried to pick new spellings that sort of resembled the old names and they all sounded like weird bootlegs of themselves

"Jala" got renamed to "Jaller" but still pronounced the same way, which only works if the robots have british accents

(SIDE NOTE: technically Vakama has an extremely bad fake british accent but only for like the 30% of the time that his voice actor remembered he was supposed to be doing a fake british accent. Man the metru nui movie sucked lmao)

The "throw a bunch of Capital Noun jargon words at the reader without explaining them" is a well-known fantasy writing hack but if you're 12 and have never seen it deployed before it rules

like I have no idea what the Tren Krom Redoubt is but it sounds cool as hell

the jargon is particularly interesting because the game writers had access to the official story bible, but weren't under close supervision from Lego's writers, so they'd constantly drop references to things that WERE official lore but WEREN'T explained anywhere until years later

Myst-ass giant creaking hissing mechanisms, but made of Technic gears and rendered in flash vectors

honestly an extremely rad aethetic

one would imagine

you okay there vakama

lmao I totally forgot about this detail

everybody tells you to go talk to Vakama and then *this* is the first thing he says to you

like what the hell man I just got here! I just woke up on a beach!

ohh yeah and then it goes straight into Tahu, the big red hero dude on all the ads, almost killing the villagers because he has literally no idea what's going on or who any of these people are

so this is where we get to the accidental genius of this game: it's not ABOUT the heroes

Lego didn't intend for this game to be a primary story vehicle. That was supposed to be the comic books, and a different, full 3D videogame that later got canceled

Lego literally didn't trust the studio making the flash game enough to let them use the Toa, the six big action figures that Bionicle was supposedly *about*

So MNOLG is about the people who LIVE here, and what they're dealing with while the heroes are off saving the world

And as it turns out, writing a story that's about relatively normal people living on an elaborate cyber-fantasy robot island is WAY MORE COMPELLING than the Quest For The Masks hero's journey stuff, which had just intended the island to be background art for the comic books

This also meant that the MNOLG devs got to pretty much create the canon visual design of the environment, because it was the only piece of media that was about traveling around the island and meeting all the people who live there

the Lore was all planned from the beginning, but MNOLG ended up establishing an emotional connection to the world that gave people a reason to *care* about Lore

When the big climaxes of the hero story landed later, they worked because the WORLD was something ppl now cared about

hot take the bionicle font is still cool as hell

is it even a point-and-click adventure game if it doesn't have this puzzle

So after getting inexplicably yelled at by Vakama and watching some Lore Cutscenes, that's pretty much it for the fire zone until the next patch landed a month later, which added the water city

IIRC this is the point where I actually started playing the game, so circa March 2001

this little blue robot appears on the beach from the starting area, looking for someone to help rescue survivors from an attack on the blue village

The fact that this game could have a persistent world that would slowly update and evolve over time as the devs added content was like.... utterly mindblowing at the time? This felt like totally uncharted territory

Obviously there WERE precedents; MUDs and MMOs existed, but I was 12 in 2001. No *kids* knew about Asheron's Call or whatever unless they possessed a very specific type of Dad

I knew you couldn't do this stuff on an N64

hell, Runescape had only launched two months earlier

oh yeah this also predated the fanfare around "episodic games" by like five years lol

again, not the FIRST EVER example or anything, but waaaay before valve/telltale tried to popularize the format

Anyway this is Maku. Later renamed to the apparently-somehow-less racist "Macku"

She's a McDonald's happy meal toy

She is blue and therefore a girl

apart from the "girls are blue" rule the only sexual dimorphism in the bionicle universe is that Gali has an extra socket joint on her torso, whereas boys have a single perfectly spherical boob

having cultivated a fanbase of teens gripped by the throes of puberty, The Lego Company was eventually forced to log onto the forums and explain "No, the robots do not fuck"
*four pages of heated discussion*
"No, the robots also CANNOT fuck"
"but the blue ones are girls"
"LOOK

The canon explanation eventually settled on "They have pronouns, but not genders"

which is honestly kind of rad

Art starts to get considerably more elaborate

This underwater section is really neat

You're looking for a gear, to fix a pump, to raise the sunken hut out of the water

the plants all look like gears, so the way you find it is by shining a light on them to look for metal

This cutscene is great; it's the first time one of the heroes shows up for a big action scene

The devs later stated that Lego was SUPER particular about never portraying Violence, so they kept having to do fights like this where she just does a cool flip and then wins offscreen

This annoyed the devs a lot, since the toys all have swords and axes and fight by bashing the evil masks off of the monsters. They said Lego eventually got too busy to carefully vet all of their work, and the later portions of the game have WAY more badass fights as a result lol

The star wars license eventually ended this, but Lego used to have a VERY strict "no weapons" policy. They were super particular about the bionicle swords always being called "tools"

When they eventually made a 3D animated movie in 2003 it was boring as shit because of this lol

Lego still wouldn't let the animators show weapons used as weapons, so the whole movie is attempting to convey a battle against the forces of darkness without depicting, uh, battle

So after rescuing the villagers in the water zone, everybody had to wait another couple months

In May the game was updated, adding a route to The Stone Zone

In which the artist responsible for drawing vector rocks starts going UNJUSTIFIABLY HARD

I think this area is really where this game started to sort of ingrain itself into my artistic sensibilities

The sense of space and scale in this area is fantastic, with all the parallaxing rock layers and ambient wind sounds and long empty roads

It sells a sense of place with wonderful efficiency. I'd played OoT, I'd seen hyrule field and had my mind blown by Big Huge Epic Adventure Landscapes, but here you can see all the brushstrokes. I could look at this with zero dev experience and *see how it worked*

It immediately got me thinking like, hey, if I learn to paint rocks and set up some parallax layers, I could MAKE stuff like this

also the idea of conveying a 3D space by just *painting* a bunch of interconnected camera angles is still super compelling

there's more or less a direct line from this game (plus also Sonic 3's backgrounds) to me eventually making Aerobat, a videogame about flying through elaborate parallax rigs of painted clouds and rocks lol

anyway welcome to po-koro, the desert town that is full of goats and ambiguously middle-eastern music samples

also the one dude wearing a black mask is evil

MNOLG specifically going for an uncomfortable middle-eastern pastiche is particularly silly given that every OTHER piece of media about this location is just like "po-koro is the village inhabited entirely by rugby hooligans"

also the black mask guy being evil caused future problems because it turns out the concept of an Evil Villager doesn't make much sense due to Lore

lego ended up writing a whole elaborate backstory spanning years to explain how this one specific dude was somehow uniquely shitty

GOSH I WONDER WHAT YEAR THIS USER INTERFACE IS FROM

So after saving the stone zone (the black mask guy was poisoning everyone for unclear reasons) we get the Book of Chronicles, which is the windows-media-player looking thing that lets you rewatch cutscenes

then everyone had to wait another two months

the earth zone is not the same thing as the stone zone

The stone zone is a desert, and the earth zone is a cave

it's different okay

The pacing of this game was really fascinating. A pretty fundamental trick for conveying scale/gravity in game design is just Make Stuff Take Longer

like a JRPG wouldn't feel Huge and Epic if you could just walk across the map instead of spending three hours fighting mobs right

Fundamentally if you're gonna put a whole lot of effort into making elaborate environment art, you've got to find some way to intentionally slow the player down so they actually notice, and thus enjoy, any of it

This isn't anything secret or sneaky, it's just part of making a game work. Absent combat, adventure games usually use puzzles

This game being targeted at like 10-13 year olds, though, meant they couldn't just surround you with interconnected puzzle logic like Myst

like if you look at gameplay, a majority of the screens are just *art*, conveying a sense of the 3D layout of the world but not containing any sort of "gameplay" stuff like puzzles or even dialogue https://twitter.com/AmazingThew/status/1329635271374155777

There were basically two reasons this ended up working, and not just wasting art on screens the player would blow past

- It got released in installments over the course of a year
- YOU HAD TO DOWNLOAD EVERY SCREEN OVER YOUR PARENTS' TELEPHONE LINE LOL

This was 2001. Broadband existed, but it was rare. If your parents were nerds you might have had DSL, but most of us weren't that fortunate

To play this game I had to block out time my mom would let me use the phone, and then *every single screen* was like 40+ seconds of loading

Crossing that desert TOOK A LONG TIME

The little parallax effects gave you something to explore on every screen. You'd end up combing every screen for interactive elements before moving on, because changing screens was a *commitment*

This... kind of sucks obviously. Like I wouldn't actually RECOMMEND designing a Mystlike where every screen has a 30-second loading bar lol

But, whether intentionally or not, it made this game feel HUGE

It really did feel like slowly exploring a massive world on foot

RIDE THE CRAB

Onu-koro's mostly a giant pain to navigate. It has a coherent layout but there are no landmarks, just dome-shaped buildings, and domes look the same from every direction

When every screen takes 30 seconds to load, getting lost is extremely unpleasant lol

this guy is waxing a crab though, so that rules at least

Definitely some cut content here. Multiple NPCs warn you about monster attacks in the tunnels, and this guy explains how to fight them off, but then you just... never encounter any monsters lol

Also "kofo-jaga" is another "devs had access to the story bible" thing

The NPCs talk a lot about specific monster types, but there was no official bestiary available at this point. Lots of names didn't correspond to lego sets and there was no information outside of this game

Turaga Whenua said fuck capitalism

Speaking of "access to the story bible", here's a reference to the biggest plot point in the entire franchise

the actual explanation for "there's a weird impenetrable rock layer underneath the entire island" landed SEVEN YEARS LATER

This was definitely intentional though; the whole first year was full of pretty overt clues that nobody actually figured out until the writers dropped the big reveal years later lol

The Main Quest is that the heroes were supposed to awaken Mata Nui, the creator god who was sleeping for some reason. The island is ALSO named Mata Nui, and the text (even in MNOLG) was constantly conflating the two, talking about the ISLAND being asleep and stuff like that

The fans all pretty much took this as like a pantheism kind of situation, where the god Mata Nui was sort of metaphorically present in the island itself or something

in 2008 the writers made the big reveal, and it turned out to be WAY more literal than that lol

When the plot finally got around to actually awakening Mata Nui, it turned out Mata Nui is straight up just a giant robot the size of the moon. It was asleep, lying on its back in the ocean. The island is a literal mask over its face

This was *literally in the logo* from the very beginning

They truly Gave Us All The Clues

somehow nobody ever figured it out

Sadly 2008 was after I'd moved on from the fandom, so I wasn't on the forums for the thread of everybody getting their minds blown after seven years

It was big enough that I still heard about it from just like shockwaves going through the rest of the internet though lmao

anyway back to MNOLG

the reason they can't tunnel any deeper is because if you dig down too far you just hit the actual robot's actual face

The Onu-Koro chapter of the game is pretty neat because it's way more involved than anything previous. There are multiple plot threads going on, and resolving them involves traveling back to other villages and talking to NPCs you've met before

It's where you start needing to develop an actual understanding of the map, and how all the routes between the villages are connected

It's nothing fancy but it's good pacing/design work. Show you a bunch of cool locations and then give an excuse to get familiar with the world

I really want to know whether the "always crabs instead of horses" concept was the MNOLG devs idea or if it came from the main writers lol

Here they've attached mining tools to the crab's claws, because animals are made of legos

I like this really weird forced perspective on this mine shaft

So the end of this chapter is just this weird room

When bionicle launched lego ran a sweepstakes where you had to find gold masks with codes hidden ("hidden") in various media they released

If you found enough codes you could enter a sweepstakes to win an actual gold mask

man now I'm just thinking about rare bionicle masks

behold the legendary TNGM: The Trans Neon Green Miru: The Coolest Mask

this was originally only available through like legoland promotions or something

photo credit to, and I quote, "xboxtravis7992"

I say "originally" because what actually happened was after lego STOPPED giving them out at legolands, they offloaded them by selling literal *sacks* of hundreds of them for $20

I think one of the bzpower admins ended up buying like thousands of them or something lmao

the fundamental unfairness of being like 14 on a fan forum and seeing AFOLs who had Drivers Licenses and Cars and Twenty Dollars who could just drive to legoland california to buy two hundred neon bionicle masks

it's fine actually I have my own neon bionicle masks

I did my first-ever commissioned artwork for some other kid on the bzpower forums and they paid me in Trans Neon Green Mirus

This dude is digging a tunnel to connect a trade route between the earth village to the air village. You could talk to him in the onu-koro chapter, but nothing happens until two months later (August 2001) when the next chapter dropped and he finishes the tunnel

Anyway this is Taipu

he's supposed to do more work after finishing the tunnel but he wants to come along to visit the tree village

if you say yes a giant wasp eats him 30 seconds later lmao

the le-koro chapter is def my favorite part of this game, and also by FAR the most ambitious

Art team's firing on all cylinders and there's some crazy elaborate gameplay stuff

no idea how they did this on schedule unless they'd been slowly building this area from the beginning

A fun property of vector art is that file size is related to geometric complexity rather than resolution

exploring this region was super hard because these screens took like 3x longer to load than any previous areas in the game lol

comparing the art in the starting area to what the devs were putting out 8 months later is wild

so the problem the Le-Koro villagers are dealing with is that giant robot wasps keep kidnapping people and hauling them off to their mountain-size wasp nest

Additionally Lewa, the big green hero guy who's supposed to save everyone, has gone missing

recall that up until this point this game has been essentially a lightweight Myst clone, with fewer puzzles and very occasional minigames

your solution to le-koro's problems is get in tHE GUN TURRET ON A FIGHTER JET THAT IS A BIRD AND PLAY FUCKING PANZER DRAGOON

that's video's not totally representative of how it originally played

from a tech standpoint this sequence was barely hanging together in 2001 and subsequent flash/browser/capitalism updates have messed it up a lot since then

but it still totally rules

it's running about 2-3x faster than originally intended. A lot of the music gets cut up weirdly because it's switching between scenes too fast. The only reason it's playable at ALL is because the wasps only move in a few set patterns, so you can hit them without aiming much

the musical decision to go with an incredibly tacky Flight of the Valkyries remix and then switching into cool ass y2k sample-based electronica and then back again is... inexplicable, but kind of rad lol

The whole theme of this game is the dev studio just like... going ever more unnecessarily hard?

Lego contracted flash games all the time, including previously from this studio. They were never terribly sophisticated

I don't think lego had any idea the devs were this ambitious

like they could have just made another puzzle, not built an entire one-off rail shooter

even then, they could have just made a basic looping background, not flying over a forest and through clouds and then OVER the clouds and then THROUGH the forest and up the side of the tower

a really core idea of this game is its intense dedication to conveying 3D spaces by illustrating multiple viewpoints

it's present in the Myst-style screen-by-screen exploration, of course, but then they even build a sense of location/traversal into this flight sequence

that seems bad

this is actually the first in a surprisingly long series of "Lewa gets absolutely owned for no particular reason" subplots

anyway it's now time for literally the most kickass fight scene in the entire franchise

apparently at this point, with the various media really taking off, lego's admin people got too busy to closely review everything the MNOLG devs were doing

they took advantage of this fact

In addition to just containing far more Violence than any other Lego-sanctioned piece of media, they actually USE THE MASKS! You know, ostensibly the whole premise of bionicle! They collect masks that have cool powers and then switch them offensively and defensively in combat!

the comic books SORTA focused on the masks, but they were also kinda not very good

the movies just like... forgot they had masks? I guess? Tahu blocks an attack once and it's treated as one of the triumphant moments in the first movie because they weren't allowed to show Fights

so lego made a cross-media franchise about robot superheroes with cool swords and elemental abilities and rad mask-based superpowers

and then the one single animation that actually makes good on this premise, across years of media, is one cutscene in a flash game lol

congratulations to the developers of Bionicle: Mata Nui Online Game, for knowing about anime

So this tree village is a good demonstration of how much this game cares about maintaining a consistent sense of 3D space

Every vantage point is viewable from multiple angles, and the parallax effects establish depth/distance, which helps augment the limited number of screens

Anyway after saving the tree/air people from Large Robot Wasps you get access to fast travel, which is broken in 2020

then it was another two-month wait until October, when the last village was added

also 9/11 happened in the middle there

this guy's watching a security system made of ice crystals that refract views of different locations around the village

So after the previous chapter's incredibly elaborate art + entire rail-shooter sequence + high-effort animated fight scene, the ice village is... pretty, but dramatically less complex lol

A good joke: These guys are all studying ancient inscrutable prophesies written on the walls

the actual text reads:

MADE BY LEGO
PRODUCED BY CH 6340 BAAR
SWITZERLAND
DISTRIBUTED
BY THE LEGO
GROUP. DY;
7190 AILLUNI
DENMARK C2001
LEGO GROUP

In which Toa Kopaka definitely 100% just kills a robot tiger instead of knocking its masks off

(also, much less polished animation work than the previous chapter, which like... fair enough honestly)

The ice chapter is pretty short, but you get a quest to go talk to all the village leaders

the next patch landed in November. The dude from the very beginning of game randomly appears in front of you. He has now successfully learned to walk so slowly that he can teleport

Chekhov's Teleporter

bonkles

art goes back to being good in this chapter

So for climax of this game has you gather a party of villagers and then go defend a temple while the heroes go fight the main villain

it involves a very jank combat minigame

it sucks tbh but I thought it was cool when I was 12

An extremely funny detail is all this dialogue about a complex type/element system that's completely absent from the actual game

presumably the devs intended this minigame to be a LOT more complex

Note, again: there was no official bestiary. Many of those monster names had never been mentioned in ANY other official media, and even the ones that DID correspond to actual lego sets had nothing to do with elemental types

This dialogue was totally baffling to read lol

meanwhile the Toa have fused and transformed into the Toa Kaita, which are possibly the stupidest design lego ever produced

nothing but respect for the hapless animator tasked with drawing that thing walking

anyway the Toa Kaita instantly get their shit wrecked by angry crabs and no one ever speaks of this moment again

also the fact that one of them is named Akamai means that for the last 19 years every time I see references to Akamai I think of this dork before before remembering the multi-billion-dollar tech corporation

yeah okay Xemnas

I like this version of Makuta more than the later depictions

he goes on a very JRPG rant about how he cannot be destroyed because he is the manifestation of destruction as a concept

later writing retconned this so they could make lego sets of a big robot who is a jerk

anyway the heroes have the stunning realization that they must Work Together to defeat evil, and then they all shoot laser beams at once and save the world

as a 12-year-old the ending was like unimaginably hype, but it's pretty standard Action Cartoon For Children fare

playing it now it's really clear that the real strength of this game is the world/exploration stuff, and how good a job it does at establishing a sense of place

Like if you want superheroes shooting colored laser beams to save the world, you have a lot of media options lol

The idea of making a game ABOUT the world in a fantasy setting, while the big heroes are off somewhere else doing their epic quests or whatever, is really unique

anyway yeah

Bionicle: Mata Nui Online Game owns

it's a pretty big part of how I ended up making games as a career

honestly I still want to make an adventure game out of paintings like this but I work too slowly for it to be feasible lol

Also: the studio that made it is Templar Games. They're still around! Not much of an online presence, but they've made some blog posts over years that talked about a lot of MNOLG dev
(i.e. the source for the stuff I wrote about their relationship to lego) https://templargames.tumblr.com/