Myth, Maori, and a Brain Tumor: The BIONICLE Saga
June 23, 2021For a time, LEGO® BIONICLE was a transmedia giant, standing knee-deep in an ocean of successful properties: 70 books, 50 comics and graphic novels, four films, a television show, a trading card game, and countless LEGO toys.
And threaded throughout the massive success of the theme sets were the video games – seven released, one lost to a sudden shift of fate.
To understand what happened to LEGO BIONICLE: The Legend of Mata Nui and why it was killed – despite being developed in parallel with the released prequel, marketed in cereal boxes and comic books nationwide, and nearly complete – you have to understand BIONICLE.
As creation myths go, the LEGO toy has a doozy.
The LEGO theme set smash hit was inspired by a desire to one up Star Wars’™ epic saga, out gotta-catch-‘em-all the compelling play of Pokémon, and one man’s personal struggle to come to grips with a benign brain tumor.
In many ways, BIONICLE was born in fertile creative ground created by myriad factors, including the state of the world and the LEGO Group in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
In 1998, the LEGO Group suffered its first loss, eventually laying off 1,000 employees. And then the following year, the company introduced sets based on licensed properties including Star Wars™. The success of licensed properties underscored the value of backstory for the company, so it started exploring the idea of creating its own properties, working with, among others, renowned Copenhagen advertising agency Advance and its art director Christian Faber.
There was also in the air, Faber says, a sense that perhaps the LEGO brick wasn’t as untouchable as once perceived, and an accompanying desire to get LEGO bricks into school yards.
That led to a slew of new initiatives, some of which set the groundwork for LEGO BIONICLE. Released in the late ‘90s, the Technic-themed Slizer/Throwbot sets were Faber’s first attempt at creating buildable action figures. Next came RoboRiders. The need for a follow-up to RoboRiders, combined with the success of the LEGO Star Wars™ sets, led to an entirely new concept.
“We were thinking, ‘OK, what if we had a story that was just as big as Star Wars™ with just as much content?” Faber said.
A major inspiration for BIONICLE’s original story came from a deeply personal part of Faber’s life. Back in 1986, when he was hired to work at the agency, he also discovered he had a benign brain tumor. Faber spent the next decade or so taking medicine to treat the mass. Unfortunately, the treatment came with a lot of side effects.
“I had sort of 10 years with morning sickness,” he said. “That was quite a strange period from your 20s to your 30s to have sort of nausea every morning because of this medicine.”
To help deal with the medicine and its effects, Faber imagined that the pills he was taking were tiny soldiers, doing battle with the tumor in his brain.
“That was sort of the story building inside my imagination, long before BIONICLE, and when I saw the packaging from the design department, which was like a canister, it just clicked and reminded me of the of the capsules I had been eating for 10 years.”
Faber’s struggle with his illness played a central role in developing the story for BIONICLE.
Alastair Swinnerton built upon some of Faber’s original ideas for what was called Bone Heads of Voodoo Island at the time and created BIONICLE’s massive backstory.
LEGO BIONICLE had a limited launch in late 2000 and went global on July 1, 2001. Designed to be a transmedia product, the toy line was enhanced with a regularly updated interactive website, a run of comics that hit during the launch window, and plans for two video games: LEGO BIONICLE: Quest for the Toa, which aimed for a fall 2001 release on the Game Boy Advance, as well as LEGO BIONICLE: The Legend of Mata Nui, which was planned for a release shortly after Quest for the Toa on Windows PC and GameCube.
The games were being simultaneously developed at game studio Saffire. One launched on time, but the other was killed off – despite being designed to tell the second half of a single cohesive story.
The two games were essentially developed simultaneously by two groups inside Saffire.
Development on the Game Boy Advance game was led by Jay Ward, while development on the PC game was led by Dan Hilton. The two teams worked closely together, ensuring that the storyline that threaded between the games remained cohesive. Both games had very aggressive release schedules, with the teams getting a bit more than a year to finish both, and that made the narrative complexity a bit more difficult to deal with.
As two teams at Saffire worked on two games, the physical BIONICLE sets were quickly becoming a cultural phenomenon. Jeff James, the producer for the games at the LEGO Group, said that as the sales increased, the expectations for the games did as well.
Both games were already making the rounds while in development. They were even shown off together at the E3 video game expo in the summer of 2001. But then the LEGO Group was seemingly blindsided by a potential lawsuit.
New Zealand-based barrister Maui Solomon, who was representing three New Zealand Maori tribes, wrote the LEGO Group saying it was inappropriate to use some of the Maori names for toys.
BIONICLE made use of names like Tohunga, which for the three Tribes that Maui represented means spiritual healer. Solomon told the LEGO Group that the tribes were prepared to allow other Maori names that weren’t sacred to be used on a commercial toy.
At first, Solomon said, the LEGO Group seemed dismissive of the tribes’ concerns.
“Initially, I got a letter from the legal advisors saying that there was nothing legally stopping them from using these names and also implying that perhaps we should be grateful that they were promoting Maori language by using names on LEGO toys,” said Solomon, who spoke with the Bits N’ Bricks podcast from the Chatham Islands in New Zealand. “My response was to write back to the LEGO Group and state that, whilst there may not be anything legally improper about this misappropriation of cultural names, it was morally and culturally offensive, and that the LEGO Group, as a company which prides itself on having a social conscience and educating the youth of the world, I expected a more ethical approach to this matter.”
Solomon said the LEGO Group’s next response came directly from the company’s headquarters. It essentially agreed with him and asked to meet. The LEGO Group’s Brian Sørensen flew to New Zealand, opening discussions with Solomon and others from the Mauri groups about how to proceed.
Months later, the LEGO Group announced that it would revisit the game, the theme set, and its inspirations and reconsider the way it uses folklore.
“Future launches of BIONICLE sets will not incorporate names from any original culture,” it said in a statement. “The LEGO company will seek to develop a code of conduct for cultural expressions of traditional knowledge.”
To handle the name changes, the LEGO Group created an in-fiction holiday for BIONICLE called Naming Day. The event allowed the company to change the name of a number of main characters, places, and people while addressing the change within the fiction of the universe.
The decision not to incorporate specific names from the Maori culture had an immediate impact on the mostly complete games. Both Saffire teams went back into their games and removed certain words and renamed certain characters.
The first of the two games, LEGO BIONICLE: Tales of the Tohunga, was renamed to LEGO BIONICLE: Quest for the Toa. It was released globally on Oct. 2, 2001. But the story-ending sequel due out for Windows PC never was.
The decision to kill LEGO BIONICLE: The Legend of Mata Nui, which was set for a December 2001 release, surprised some involved in its development. Even externally it seemed quite sudden, in part because of the extensive marketing that the game received. The release date was announced in a BIONICLE comic, and a cutscene from the game was burned on a CD-ROM disc and loaded into packages of Cheerios cereal. There was even a call for public beta testers.
Darvell Hunt, who had been working on the game for months, said things at the studio hadn’t been going well before the cancellation, with employees working long hours and pay for some starting to slow.
Then, on Oct. 10, a bit more than a week after the release of LEGO BIONICLE: Tales of the Tohunga, Hunt came into work and was told that the studio was canceling the second game and letting some people go – including him.
To this day, Hunt isn’t sure why the game was shut down. But he’s heard plenty of rumors, including blaming a shift in management at the LEGO Group and a sense that, in wake of the 9/11 attacks, the LEGO Group didn’t have the stomach for a game featuring any violence. He also believes Saffire’s financial struggles – the company would eventually shut down in 2007 – played a significant role.
Jeff James said he believes it was mostly to do with some significant shifts at the LEGO Group, specifically at LEGO Media International. Around that time, LMI was renamed LEGO Software, and new people were brought in to reassess and run things. Among them was Tom Stone, who in just a couple of years would leave the LEGO Group and lead the creation of LEGO Star Wars™ with Traveller’s Tales.
Tom Stone said the decision to kill the game was driven by a number of issues. The game was originally designed as a first-person shooter of sorts, but that would have given it a teen rating, something that the LEGO Group wasn’t comfortable with. So, the game’s camera was shifted from first-person to third-person. That change, as Stone put it, “really spoiled the game experience. The BIONICLE FPS would have sold millions as it’s exactly what the young gamers wanted.”
It was Darvell Hunt’s first official video game, and he was deeply saddened both by the cancellation and being laid off.
“I was really disappointed because I’d been working for a whole year on it,” he said. “And I would never get my name in the credits. And I would never get to play it. And I’d never get to show my kids or relatives and say, ‘This is the game I worked on. How cool is this?’ It was also, I think, the first time I’d ever been laid off. I called my wife, and we chatted about it ,and she started to cry on the phone because she didn’t know what we were going to do.
“I was not crying myself. It was kind of a shock to me.”
While the BIONICLE theme set had a tremendous run that included about 70 books, more than 50 comics and graphic novels, seven released video games, four films, a television show, a trading card game and countless toys, it eventually wrapped up in 2010. Five years later, the LEGO Group made a second run at the success of BIONICLE, but the reboot didn’t really work out.
While the first generation of BIONICLE toys have been discontinued for about a decade and the second generation for half that, fans of the toys continue to thrive, gathering online in a multitude of fan sites. Among them is a group that tracks down lost bits of lore and toys. They even managed to breathe new life into the once forever-lost, canceled LEGO BIONICLE: The Legend of the Mata Nui game.
BIONICLE super fan Liam Scott became obsessed with the theme set and its games around 2008, well after Mata Nui failed to launch. His entry point into that lost video game came through an introduction to the Adult Fan of LEGO (AFOL) website BioMedia Project. The site houses a massive archive of all things BIONICLE, from comics to movies and even video games.
Pretty soon after joining the group, Scott found himself falling down the rabbit hole of LEGO BIONICLE: The Legend of Mata Nui. What was – in 2001 – simply an unreleased game took on gravitas. It became a holy grail for fans of BIONICLE over the ensuing decade – an enduring mystery begging to be solved.
For Liam, the mystery was made even more enticing by his own experiences playing LEGO BIONICLE: Quest for the Toa. When he got to the end of that game, he found not a story neatly wrapped up, but a cliffhanger meant to be resolved in the unreleased sequel.
Though the main story threads were resolved in the Mata Nui Online Game, the unresolved ending, and the knowledge that the game was apparently mostly finished when it was canceled, was just too enticing to forget about.
While fans remained passionate about their quest to unearth the game, it seemed unlikely. The Legend of Mata Nui was canceled in 2001, the team who worked on it laid off, and the company that created it later shut down.
But then the seemingly impossible happened.
One day in 2018, someone at the BioMedia Project received an anonymous email with a link. Inside? An early version of the incomplete game and a single sentence: “Here you go, have fun.”
Shortly after that, another early version of the game surfaced.
Armed now with two early builds of the game, the fans set to work deciphering what they had and deciding what to do with it.
One build was from July 2001 and seemed to be in the process of a complete overhaul of both the gameplay loop and the script.
So, in short order, the BioMedia Project went from having nothing of that legendary lost game to having an alpha build and a beta build.
The team put time into fixing up the alpha and beta builds of the game to make them playable and share with fans. That meant fixing bugs and doing some quality-of-life refinements.
The real focus today, though, is on a version called BIONICLE The Legend of Mata Nui Rebuilt, is a version that combines the best elements of the alpha and beta and also layers in some new features. Rebuilt is in development now at Lightstone Studio, which is run by Liam Scott.
Among the major issues the team faces in creating Rebuilt is the game’s missing ending. Neither the alpha nor the beta currently has a final boss fight, though Scott says that one was clearly intended. The problem is that there is nothing to work with, so they’re creating it from scratch.
The team does have a few references noted in the code and some of the concept art released by Christian Faber. It also helped that, in the world of BIONICLE, there really is only one main major bad guy: Makuta.
Liam said he can’t say when Rebuilt will be finished. The pandemic set things back for the team, like it has for many in the game industry. But his goal is to clean up the game as much as possible, including that boss battle, add multiple language support, and then release it to the world of BIONICLE fans.
When looking back at the birth of BIONICLE and its ability to attract fans more than a decade after its death, Alastair Swinnerton believes that its fandom is born out of its rich narrative universe, not just the toys.
“We created a world that they could inhabit as children,” he said. “We created so many layers of creativity in the same way, if you like, as the Star Wars™ universe. We created a universe with huge levels of backstory for the different characters that just resonated in the same way as Star Wars™ and currently the likes of Marvel and DC.
“I think we just got the formula right. As simple as that, you know? We achieved what we set out to achieve. We created something like Star Wars™ and like Pokémon that wasn’t either of them, but that appealed to the imagination of the audience in the same way.”
This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.
Explore more…
In order of appearance:
LEGO Slizer – Brickset
LEGO RoboRiders – Wikipedia
Christian Faber – Official website
Alastair Swinnerton – Official website
Star Wars™ – Official website
Pokémon – Official website
BioMedia Project – Official website
BIONICLE The Legend Rebuilt – Official website
