It's time to play THE SEQUEL TO MYST
that's right folks it's BIONICLE: MATA NUI ONLINE GAME
This is a record of a twitter thread, originally posted in 2020
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
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 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
you okay there vakama
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 like this really weird forced perspective on this mine shaft
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
if you say yes a giant wasp eats him 30 seconds later lmao
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
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
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)
Chekhov's Teleporter
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
nothing but respect for the hapless animator tasked with drawing that thing walking
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
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)
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TEMPLAR GAMES INC.