Bionicle

» see bionicle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Lego Group spent the 1990s in serious financial trouble and its first fix was licensing Star Wars, which sold enormously and sent most of the margin to Lucasfilm. The lesson the company drew was that it needed a story of its own. What it got was Bionicle, launched in 2001, and the property became one of the reasons Lego survived the decade at all.

The concept came from Christian Faber, who had pitched a line called Cybots after sitting with a Technic set and wondering why he could only build a car. Ball-and-socket joints and Technic elements made a figure that a child assembled rather than unwrapped. Lego tried the format twice first, as Slizer in 1999 and RoboRiders in 2000. The third attempt got a name that was a portmanteau of "biological chronicle" and a full story bible, written by Alastair Swinnerton off a brief that had been circulated to outside writers under the working title BoneHeads of Voodoo Island.

Every wave of sets was a chapter of that story. There were comics, novels, two direct-to-video films, and a set of web serials, and the whole thing hung together as one continuous narrative for a decade. Lego themes before this had a premise. This one had continuity, and that turned out to be both the reason it worked and the reason it stopped working.

In 2001 I was seventeen, on dial-up in Ankara, and Lego was an import-priced object in Turkey rather than a thing children simply had. Bionicle was aimed at eight to sixteen year olds in markets that could absorb a new $9 canister every few months. I watched none of this happen, and I am aware of it now mainly because the people who did are still arguing about the canon.

~ the record ~

~ the flash part ~

The piece of Bionicle that belongs in an internet graveyard rather than a toy one is the Mata Nui Online Game. Templar Studios built it and released it episodically across 2001, nine chapters between 1 January and 15 December, as a browser adventure you walked through in first person while the year's storyline unfolded around you. It was the story, not an advertisement wrapped around the story, and it landed at exactly the moment when a Flash plugin was the only thing on the web that could carry an atmosphere.

A sequel, The Final Chronicle, ran seven chapters from 29 May 2003 to 9 January 2004. There were dozens of smaller games alongside them, some promotional and some pulled out of console titles. Official Bionicle web traffic passed a million page views a month, which for a toy company's site in the middle of the 2000s was a serious number.

~ the fall ~

In November 2009 Lego decided to end production after one final 2010 wave. The stated reason was low sales and no new interest, and the diagnosis underneath it was that ten years of accumulated lore had made the property unenterable. A child arriving in 2009 had a decade of masks and factions to catch up on before the shelf made any sense at all.

Greg Farshtey, who had written the comics and much of the story for years, asked for and got permission to keep the narrative going as serials on BionicleStory.com. He stopped posting in 2011 because of other work, and Lego shut the site down in 2013 with several serials unfinished. He kept canonizing fan-built models on forums until Lego let him go in 2022, after twenty two years.

~ the second death ~

Work on a reboot started in 2012 under Matt Betteker, a junior designer promoted off Hero Factory, and Lego announced the return in September 2014 with the first sets revealed at New York Comic Con on 9 October. Generation 2 launched in January 2015 with the lore deliberately simplified and a much smaller media footprint around it.

Lego canceled it in late 2016, ahead of sets that had been planned into 2017. The version fans settled on is that Generation 2 was under-marketed and leaned on the existing community to promote itself, and that the simplified story removed the exact thing the original audience had stayed for. Lego had killed the first run for having too much story and the second for having too little.

A single promotional set turned up in January 2023, brick-built versions of Tahu and Takua given away with large purchases, after Bionicle won the first round of Lego's own 90th anniversary fan poll. It is a strange kind of afterlife: a toy line that ended twice, still winning votes among adults who were eight when it started.

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