Use the audio player above to listen, or right click on it and select Save As to download. A lightly annotated text transcript of this audio post, edited for clarity, follows below.  ContentsI. Background in game and web design Full Text
N: My name is Naomi Clark, and I started working at lego in 1999 as a Web Producer. At the time, I worked on a couple of the websites on lego.com, back in those days. Then I started to specialize in games - I think I had a Game Producer title as well, a little bit after the time period we’re talking about. But for the most part, I think the title we used back then was Web Producer. ... E: Welcome to what I am calling a Special Audio Edition of the bionicle.gay chronicle. So I reached out to Naomi Clark, who worked with Leah Weston Kaae on the original bionicle.com in 2000, 2001 and 2002, and to my excitement and delight she agreed to meet with me to talk about the bionicles. To Naomi’s immense credit, she is perhaps the only person that I can imagine on the original Bionicle team would agree to an interview for a website called ‘bionicle.gay’. Just a quick note before the start, I made a rookie audio recording mistake and left the channel Naomi’s audio was in to auto-duck when I was speaking. Thankfully, nothing was really lost, but there are a few bits where her audio gets a bit quieter or crinkly and I just wanted to give an explanation for that. Sorry about the crinkles, but that aside, I hope that you enjoy! ... E: Where would you say your interest in game design or web design came from? N: Great question. Like a lot of people who are involved in games, I started making games when I was a kid, although mostly board games back in the day. I started making board games when I was in elementary and middle school, and started doing some programming. Although, this was the 80s, so a lot of the programming I did was like, typing lots of commands in basic, over many thousands of lines, and then trying to debug them. I did that mostly on an Apple II computer, so like all monochrome, early home computer technology. I did get interested in making games – it seemed very far out of reach, like “how would you even do that – how would you get a package game into a store?” There were so few people doing that those days, they were all concentrated in a few places, like in Silicon Valley. When I got a little older, I got access to the internet in the early to mid 90s, because my father was a professor at the University of Washington, and I was able to figure out how to get access to his accounts that he wasn’t using on the university supercomputers. I started also working with college students – and I was in high school at the time – I started making some early online games. They were all text-only, because this was even before the World Wide Web existed as a graphical thing. We would connect to servers and make text-only massively multiplayer games, which were referred to as muds back in the day. I was making muds in the 90s, and continued doing that in college, and then when graphics appeared on the web – in like 1993/1994 – I was like “oooh, this is really cool, I wanna make a web page”. I ended up working as an intern in college at a really early web magazine. It was actually one of the first online publications that had banner ads. E: Oh, ok! N: So I can’t personally take responsibility for unleashing banner ads on the web, but I was around back then. And I used to have to make banner ads as part of my job. E: [Laughing] Ohhh, great, yeah. N: Yeah. That was sort of a new idea back then. I worked on a bunch of weird little experimental websites. The website I worked on was called word.com, and it was mostly autobiographical nonfiction – short stories, vignettes from life. We would illustrate them and do some very 90s web design. Then we also had some small games that, back in those days, were mostly made in Shockwave. I got a little bit of experience doing that, and at some point, I think it was a little bit later… The fortunes of websites and the early web industry kind of rose and fell in the late 90s, and there was a bit of a bust. Some companies went out of business, the company I was working for went out of business for a while, but then found a new owner. We started trying to think about doing different sorts of things - we had been doing various types of interactive games. We worked on a early chatbot that was based on ELIZA, and then we decided to do a multiplayer game. And so I worked on a game called sissyfight 2000. That game, which we launched in 1999, we almost found a publishing/distribution partner for. It’s actually still online, at sissyfight.com. E: Oh, nice! N: We resurrected it maybe five years ago and ported it to HTML5. It was that game that brought me to the attention of lego. The company I was working for, and the web magazine, finally shut down at the end of the 90s. I had to look for a new job and I saw, actually on Craigslist, an ad to work at lego Direct. E: [laughing] N: Which, I had no idea there was a lego office in New York. And so I was like, “should I apply for a job at lego?” And my friends were like, “yeah, why not, that seems cool?” So I applied and went and interviewed and was like “oh yeah I’ve made some online games”, and there were very few people who had made online games at that point! lego had like one online game that was popular, it was called the Brick Game, and it was a little multiplayer game. E: Oh, yes! N: A simple one, but it was kind of a neat little engineering feat, some of the Danish programmers had put it together for the website. So they were looking for more people to do online games, who had that experience, and who had worked on websites, and I had been working first as an intern, and then as an assistant editor on this website – publishing stuff on a regular schedule for about five years at that point. So they hired me, and I started to work at lego, and got to go to Billund and work on various types of websites. E: Nice! Ok. That lego Direct office, that was kind of starting up right as you were joining in, right? It was sort of a new thing? N: Yeah, it was pretty new. E: In the Bits N’ Bricks podcast where you appeared talking about Junkbot, you described the New York game dev scene at the time was like “a Cambrian stew of creative people” that lego was looking to channel to expand their website. How would you describe the overall ethos or philosophy that was guiding the development of lego.com at that time? N: Great question. I think it was slightly different at different levels. The head of lego Direct was this guy, Brad Justus. Who is still around… not at lego, but he’s still an active professional working in web and online commerce. He had convinced lego upper management that it was a great idea to bring together the direct mail-order business, and lego Magazine, and everything online, under one roof. I think the real ethos there was not just about e-commerce, but actually about being closely connected to the community, and being able to have a place where adult fans of lego could connect with people inside of the company. A lot of what Brad Justus did was actually go out into the community and visit lego user group meetings, going to the big meetings of community sites like lugnet. At that time lugnet had a somewhat hostile relationship with lego. E: [laughing] yeah. N: Especially because it was after this period where there were a lot of… y’know, what lugnet folks call spuds, like Single-Purpose, Useless, Decorative? E: Oh, sure. Like the “juniorization”. N: Right, exactly. The “juniorization” was a big concern, and what direction things were going in. And also…. oh yeah, like……. I think they called them boobs? Like Bricks Of Other Bricks?? Putting multiple bricks together… E: Yeah, poop. Parts Out of Other Parts. N: Oh, poops, yeah okay! I’m sorry, not boob, of course, poop! Parts Out of Other Parts. And so Brad’s idea was, “hey, maybe we can build some bridges of communication here, and have a slightly different business under the lego umbrella.” The biggest groups in lego, at the time, they were divided into the younger… first duplo, off to the side. Then the girls group, which at that time was working on scala, but then later, Friends. And then the big cash cow was the 4-8. Which is all the like, lego Castle, lego Ninjas, the pirate ship behind you, all that stuff. And then 9-13, which was mostly Technic, right? E: Mhm. N: I was assigned to the 9-13 web group. Brad Justus’ real ethos was “hey, let’s let those guys do those things” – because that’s where all the TV commercials, and the catalogs, and everything was focused, mostly on 4-8 and 9-13 – but then he thought “well, we could actually make things for the adult audience.” That eventually led to My Own Creation, lego Architecture, all of this other stuff. Actually the really huge Star Wars models were part of that drive too. Y’know, like the gigantic-ass Star Destroyer and stuff. Those things are like “Ok, its not going to be juniorized, it’s gonna be no spuds or poops”… E: [laughing] N: And that was sort of born out of these conversations between Brad and also big sculptors like Eric Harshbarger and other people who do the gigantic lego sculptures. Saying “hey, let’s really think about what those folks need.” So that was the top-level ethos. And then the next level down was, “alright, we’re gonna make an awesome website. We’re gonna try and really have lego.com be a somewhat state-of-the-art website.” Not just one big Flash app. The typical advertising site of the time was just one giant Flash, with animated menus and stuff. It was kinda fire and forget – like you’d have an ad agency do a website. Then, oh, it would stay there for five years, and just be this Flash app. Instead, the idea was lego.com should be a living website. There were forums for kids running there, so it was a place for community. Adults were mostly shunted off to lugnet. But everything was moderated for kids, so there was actually quite a bit of work that had already gone into it. There were online games, and then EVERY product line – lego Ninja, lego Castle, lego Town – had its own sub-website. It was actually a pretty big enterprise to run all this stuff and keep it updated. There was a guy named Paul Walton, who was like, a Real Cowboy from Texas, who was living in New York. He kinda headed up this whole group where it was like, “yeah, let’s run the website part of lego Direct - lego.com - and have it be very comprehensive. Like, everything lego. There would be a legoland section, an online version of lego Magazine, we’re gonna keep on building out the stuff and its gonna be the coolest kid’s site.” We really saw our competition as being nick.com, or other major kid’s brand websites – disney.com, Club Penguin, those kinds of sites, where like, “lego.com is gonna be as good as all those sites, its not just gonna be marketing”. At a level below that, I was in this 9-13 group where there were three or four other Web Producers, including Leah Weston, who was the bionicle.com mastermind. Our idea there was, “oh we’re gonna do cool more advanced stuff.” We had Mindstorms, Technic, lego Racers, which came a little bit later, and Bionicle. And then the lego Build section, which I was initially in charge of, which is where Junkbot was. At the time, there was no, just, general lego building line. Although, I think in like 2004 they launched legoMake & Create. But our ethos was “Ok, we’re not gonna focus on this sort of roleplaying-y stuff like Castle and Ninja,” which was in 4-8. “We’re gonna try and focus on, what kind of cool stuff can you make with lego, what sort of architectural principles can you learn from lego designers in Billund.” And do stuff to try and keep slightly older kids still interested in lego. Because we were always kind of like, “oh there’s this big-” … a lot of people stopped playing with lego when they were eight or nine. The transition to Technic was always this big, challenging thing. “Are you gonna learn how gears and shafts and motors work?” It’s pretty difficult! Mindstorms was appealing to some people, but it cost $200. E: Right, yeah!! N: Which is even more now, with inflation. It was the most expensive toy. I worked on the Mindstorms website, and did some Mindstorms games. I worked on the Build website. There was a big Mindstorms forums, too, which was a lot of adults posting weird Mindstorms things. Like Mindstorms toilet cleaners. E: Oh sure [laughing] N: And like, printers made with an RCX. We were excited, because we were like, “Ok, we’re doing this high-end stuff. It’s actually websites for adults and kids, where we’re teaching you how to use Technic things.” That was kind of the environment, and the very ethos, when Bionicle got started. E: Nice, that’s super cool! So if its something that you are comfortable speaking to, what was the experience being trans at lego? N: Oh good question. So I actually transitioned at lego. E: Oh, wow! OK. N: When I started working there, I had not transitioned. It was actually… let’s see. I worked first on Mindstorms and Build in 1999-2000. And I worked on Bionicle and Build together in 2000-2001. I was kind of the junior Web Producer, and I assisted Leah, who was the lead Web Producer on Bionicle. Then in 2002 I worked on lego Racers. I’ll always remember that because it was actually when I went on a trip to Billund that I got like, really depressed, and so- [laughing] E: [laughing] Oh no!! N: Actually, in the lego Direct office, I was sitting there reading… I don’t know, I think it was one of those websites that had been around forever, like Andrea James’ TS Road Map. Which were these very old-school, like “Here’s all the steps you need to follow in order to transition”. And it was very intimidating, and a little bit like oh my gosh, these ladies are very serious! And they all wear business suits, and they’re like, “I’m a successful trans lady!” E: [giggling] N: I actually stayed really late at the lego Direct office one night, while I was working on Racers, or like – maybe it was in 2003... I was working on Make & Create when that was launching. It was some time around then. I was totally alone in the legoDirect office, reading these sites and I was like, gasp, I could actually do this… and broke down crying and decided to transition. E: [laughing] awww... N: Yeah, at that office! Then I transitioned on the job in like 2003-2004. Other than a few people who were, like, a little… there was this dudebro side of lego Direct. They were actually pretty sexist, too. They got in trouble eventually for having a ranking of who the sexiest women in the office were. It was mostly programmers and IT staff – guys. So they were not very friendly to me when I transitioned. They would give me the stink eye, or walk the other way. But on the whole, people were generally OK. And I was kind of early transition during that period, like, y’know, wearing a lot of hoodies! E: [giggling] N: And showing up at work with a blotchy red face from my electrolysis. E: Oh sure, yeah! N: Stuff like that. So that was the period of time I was working there. This is all after Bionicle had fully launched. We were already at the point where the Bohroks were out. E: Oh, yeah, OK. N: And I was working on it less, although Leah was still full-bore on that. That’s around when the lego Direct office in New York closed, in like 2004. Everybody got an offer to either move to Slough, E: In the UK! N: Yeah, in the UK. Closer to lego Software. That’s where they moved a lot of the web operations in the mid-2000s. That was also in part because everybody at lego Direct in New York spoke English, and they were like, “OK, you can just move to Slough and it’s still an English-speaking country. We’ll handle all your visas and stuff.” Not everyone… I think the web designers and coders mostly didn’t get that offer. But the web producers, who were sort of running the websites, dealing with a lot of management, and working with the marketing teams in Billund, did get that offer. I decided not to go, and it was actually because I was transitioning. I was like, I don’t think I want to do both of these things at the same time. I’m not gonna move to England, try to set up a new life, only know people from lego… I was sort of like, oh! This is kind of… it’s sort of like people who transition in high school, they’re like “what if I move to a different high school?” y’know? [giggles] E: [giggles] N: It was a little bit like that! What if I just… didn’t work at lego anymore, and I got a different job, and I could kind of start over. E: Right!! N: So I took a severance package instead, which was pretty helpful for me. It took me a little while, but then I ended up working at Lambda Legal, the big LGBTQ… and then, finally, went to work at GameLab, the place that did Junkbot and a whole bunch of games. They had stopped doing web games by that point, but I went to work for them as a game designer and I’ve just been making games ever since. E: Awesome! Huh, I did not know that you were at GameLab, that’s great. N: Yeah! I worked there right after lego. I was the producer for all their games at lego. They worked on maybe six lego.com games, and I was the lego-side producer. After lego moved back to Slough, there were still a couple more games that GameLab worked on, but they mostly shifted to working on their own games. That’s when Diner Dash came out. That’s the time that I started working there. E: That explains a lot! I know 2004, 2005, that’s when lego kind of stopped working with Templar. N: That’s right, yeah. E: Well cool! Jumping more into Bionicle-specific stuff, do you remember your first introduction to Bionicle, or what your initial thoughts were? N: Oh yeah. It was super top secret. E: [laughing] N: It was all of this stuff – the early stuff was all made by Advance, right? They had this whole huge vision of what it was going to be like. But it was not super clear! We had drawings of these things and some- I found out about it at the time when Advance had not even yet produced the full 3D models. There were some prototypes of Bionicle parts. The building instructions were not totally done yet for the first Toa. They hadn’t made all of the animations that were used to launch the Toa, that was in process – there were wireframes of them. So at first it was kinda hard to understand, we were like “what is this??” E: [giggling] N: A lot of the people who were into Technic were kind of skeptical. Like, “you can’t put a motor in here! How does this work, what is it supposed to be? It’s an action figure? Is this really gonna work?” And they were very weird looking action figures! They also didn’t look like He-Man or anything, right? E: [laughing] right! N: They look like strange, skeletal… robot guys. With masks on. But Leah Weston 100% was sold on the idea. She was one of the biggest evangelists. And I’m kind of convinced, to the extent that web marketing and the Mata Nui online game helped popularize Bionicle? Leah was the one who masterminded that. Because, every single meeting we went to in 2000, it was just like, “You guys, Bionicle is going to be very big. It is the Craze.” E: [laughing] N: The attempt was to make what lego called a ‘craze’ back then. They wanted to make a Pokemon or something like that. The toy that every kid would be talking about, and just appear with a huge splash. Now I don’t think – Bionicle didn’t turn out exactly like that. Because it was not the Christmas toy of 2001. Instead it created a cult following that grew over many years, right? So it was a little bit more of a slow burn. But my initial impression, I was like – what is this, I don’t quite get it. Then I was like, oh, the masks are kinda cool. There’s a lot of cool worldbuilding that the Advance guys had done. Like, obviously, drawing on Polynesian stuff. E: Right. N: I was like, that’s really unusual. This is not like any other lego line that had been done before. Even though there were some weird ones that I was into, like Time Twisters. E: Oh, yes!! I love Time Twisters. [laughing] N: Oh, yeah. I got all the Time Twisters as soon as I started working at lego. But Leah was totally sold on Bionicle, she would not stop talking to everybody about masks. E: [laughing] N: She was like, “there are gonna be these mask packs, its gonna be randomized, it’s like Magic cards or baseball cards.” She was convinced that was gonna be really huge, and that we had to be able to track all the different masks, and they were gonna be collectible. And everyone was like “ok. I guess so.” E: [giggling] N: And then! I remember getting the actual prototypes. We couldn’t build them yet. They weren’t glued together, but they were… the leg parts and arm parts, they were totally new. So they were made out of resin. And we were like, “OK, these are cool, these are weird!” But then the moment that actually convinced everybody was when Advance finished the first 3D trailers, where you had one for each Toa. And they’re doing these cool things. And we were like, “holy shit!!” E: [giggling] N: It’s as if there’s a TV show, except the TV show doesn’t exist. You have this feeling like there’s a TV show, just from these trailers. And you’re like, wow, ok, it’s kind of genius. Instead of having to make He-Man the cartoon, you’re just going to give this impression. What if there was a TV show? But you’re gonna imagine it. And Leah was like, “yeah but here’s the thing. We have to kind of be the TV show. That’s why we have to spend three times as much money on Mata Nui online game than any other game. It’s gonna be this huuuuge budget.” Again, if she had not been selling people on it every single second – in part because she really thought she was gonna make her mark with Bionicle. And it worked! She moved to Denmark! She didn’t go to Slough, she was like, “I don’t want to go to England, I’m going to Billund! I want to live in the middle of nowhere!! In a field!!! And get closer to where the action is.” E: [giggling] N: She was like, the most ambitious Web Producer. And I got to basically be her assistant producer. So if I’m talking enthusiastically about this, it was really valuable to be her right-hand girl on this. Everyone was like, “what the hell. This is not a good idea to spend so much money on Mata Nui online game.” But she kept pushing it. And Peter Mack had this very grand vision for it. So it was like, the two of them. Peter Mack always wears a black suit with a dark top. E: [laughing] interesting! N: Leah was also sort of like – the rest of us were weird web people, we’d show up in T-shirts and jeans. But Leah was always like, “I’m wearing a suit. I need to make sure people know I’m serious.” Even though she also came from a web design-y background, and was an artist. The two of them wanted to look formidable, and be like, “we’re serious about this Bionicle thing.” E: [more giggling] N: “We’re gonna do six chapters of Mata Nui online game. We’re gonna do it all the way.” You know what resulted from that! It really really had an impact! Because they were really serious about it. E: Yeah! And it filled that void that the canceled PC game left. N: That’s right, yeah. E: Cool. So you’ve already talked a little bit about this, but – you and Leah, you were both in these Producer roles. Leah was kind of in charge of the Bionicle site. Was it kind of just, you two tag-teaming the direction of it? Were there other people involved? Or what did that process look like? N: Leah, because it was so important to her, she was really trying to figure out every piece of it. Then she would toss things to me because there was so much to be done. That was why I was asked - I was working on Mindstorms and Build, and our boss pulled me off of Mindstorms. He was the guy who had built and launched the Mindstorms website. He was like, “OK, I’ll handle Mindstorms, you just help Leah.” So it was just the two of us bouncing ideas back and forth – like what should this look like, how can we get this? I learned ASP (active server pages) which is what all of lego.com was built in. Because we almost could not get enough programmer time to do all these fixes, and it was a very complex little website. I was like, putting together assets and lining things up and doing a bunch of fixes. Leah was also – we were both coding on the website and also acting as producers. Getting everything pixel-perfect and dotting all the Is, crossing the Ts, and then just playing through Mata Nui online game over and over. We were kind of the main QA for it. And then, making sure everything was lore-accurate. Templar was pretty good at that, especially Peter, because he was also really into it. But everything had to line up pretty well, had to make sense. So we did a looot of back and forth with, like, do players understand what’s going on? Is it mysterious enough vs being too mysterious? We went around and around a lot on those kinds of things. E: Interesting! So you probably then had access to the story bibles and the stuff – the reference material the story world had to be based on. N: Yes, definitely. In the United States, the main person working on that was Greg Farshtey. E: Right. N: He did some novelizations later I think, too, right? He’s basically a fantasy sci-fi writer and has done a ton of LEGO stuff. He was working closely with Advance and he would let us in on some things. Honestly it wasn’t until they were planning the next year – the Bohrok year – that we found out the Really Big Secret Mata Nui stuff. E: Oh, really? Interesting, ok. N: Yeah cuz I’m not sure… I’m sure Christian [Faber] from Advance knew everything. E: It was his idea, yeah! [referring to the giant robot] N: He probably had it all written somewhere. But he wasn’t even telling people inside of lego some of this stuff. E: [laughing] N: Like I don’t think anyone inside of – or very few people, maybe Greg, knew about the whole. Mata Nui is a giant robot, and Makuta and Mata Nui fought in the ancient times and whatever. That whole backstory. We found out about that after the first website was launched, and after the toys were out. E: Interesting, ok. N: And we were like [sound effect of mind exploding], y’know? E: [giggling] N: We were like, this is something we can never tell any child. Ever. It was really very very locked down and secretive. That’s when I was like, oh, this is really going to have long legs. Although the marketing side folks were like, “we want this to be the biggest toy of 2001.” They weren’t even really thinking too far past that. But Christian and Greg and Leah, they were all like, “No. This is gonna last a really long time! And it’s all gonna unfold slowly! And you’re gonna find this stuff out! And its a face!” And all of this stuff like that. So I was like oh ok, this is really awesome. I worked a ton on the first site. Then on the second site – the Bohrok site, for 2002 – I probably did about half of what I’d done on 2001, because I started to work on Racers then too. There’s a main priority for every year. Bionicle was the #1 priority for the website and for marketing in general for 2001, then Racers was supposed to be for 2002. We did a huge game for Racers also, which was the Drome Racing Challenge. Which also has people who formed a fan following for that game. E: For sure! N: It was just – y’know, its not Bionicle! E: [laughing] N: It was way more normal! I was a little bit like, awww, I wish I could still work on Bionicle. But you know, I helped out with the Bohrok stuff. And Mata Nui online game, it came out in installments. There was just not time to finish it all for the launch date of the website. So I kept on helping out with the later ones, too, because I wanted to stay in touch. But really after the first launch, it was primarily Leah. E: Ok, gotcha. You mentioned doing some trips to Billund, that sort of thing. Was any of that tied into Bionicle? Were there story meetings, direction meetings for the website, that kind of thing? N: I’m trying to think if I was… I think for the 2001 launch, the very first website, and the first Mata Nui online game, I didn’t go to Billund for that. I was actually working on Mindstorms, where the designers were in Novato, California. And then Build, which had no exact toy connection. So the first time I really spent a lot of time in Billund was actually for lego Racers. It was a little bit of a prestige thing, like, we’re the web team! It was very valuable for everyone on the web team to have access to the toy designers, and to the marketing people in Billund, who had to approve everything for the websites. Remember, we were dealing with the product marketing side of the website, not the rest of lego Direct which is all about adult fans and make-your-own-creation and stuff like that. We were kind of powering the rest of that, because most of the budget for the website came from those big marketing budgets. The marketing budget… they were spending millions of dollars on the TV ads. And then we would get a slice, because the online marketing was just a fraction of what they would spend on TV. Which is kinda still usually the case! The games, in part because of people like me… well, everybody was really into web games back then. They were actually the biggest part of the online budget. The Mata Nui online game helped cement that. Eventually, that kind of dwindled, like after 2005 I think it really shrank, the budgets for games. I didn’t get to go to Billund… like I said, they were super locked down. It was a little bit like they were mimicking the way that lego worked with LucasArts on Star Wars. E: Ohhhh, interesting. N: Because Star Wars had preceded that, and in order to do anything with Star Wars, there was always only one person from the Web who was allowed to have access to the stuff. That person got to go to Skywalker Ranch, but then had to sign, like twelve NDAs. Phantom Menace was coming out and all these things. So the Bionicle people were like, “Well we’re E: [giggling] N: “We’re secret. You have to come into this room if you want to see the next wave of Bionicle toys.” I didn’t have that level of access, cuz Leah was the one. But I was sort of like Leah’s sidekick for that stuff, so I would find out from her. I would go... I was her sounding board. E: Gotcha! Ok yeah, that makes sense. Okay – I think I want to go in to some of these mysteries of the website here. N: Yeah! E: First thing. It seems like, based on some evidence that you can gather - following the paper trail - there was a CD-ROM release planned for Mata Nui online game, in some capacity? Just wondering if that rang a bell for you. N: I remember there being discussions about that. I think it was definitely a dream that we’d be able to actually put that out. I think for a couple reasons. Part of it was definitely Peter Mack’s ambitions for Templar – to sort of say like, oh we could release a Real Game. I’m sure Peter suggested that, he probably pitched it. And I’m also equally sure that, if Peter pitched that, Leah would’ve also been like, “yeah, this is really great”. E: [giggling] N: I don’t know if it ever would’ve been able to go further than that. There was a pretty strict division between what we were allowed to do with games, and what tread into lego Software’s territory. They were over in England. Traveler's Tales… E: Oh, yeah. N: That did the earlier… E: lego Star Wars. N: Yeah, lego Star Wars games and that stuff. They spun out of lego Software. But a bunch of people stayed behind, those were the people who worked on the early lego Creator games, with like, the Brickster. And those types of things. They were still operational, but kind of much smaller, now that most of it had been outsourced to Traveler’s Tales. But they still felt really strongly, that “no WE control the software. Anything that’s on a CD-ROM has to go through us.” But the Bionicle game had been canceled and they were managing the external studio, and the relationship for that. It didn’t work out. I think that that was part of why Peter and Leah were like, “...BUT, what if the Mata Nui online game, WAS the Bionicle game?” I’m pretty sure it was shut down, because it was like, “No. Don’t get too big for your britches, you web people over there in New York!” E: [laughing] N: “You guys just do your Shockwave games in a webpage, please. Don’t put anything on a CD-ROM.” The one CD-ROM we were allowed to have anything to do with was a Mindstorms CD-ROM. That had games on it, I think we maybe put some of the games from the web on a Mindstorms CD-ROM at some point. But that’s because Mindstorms was totally a little separate from the rest of lego. It was operated out of Novato, back in those days. E: Cool. Ok, next one here… so. There is like, a… it was sort of like a Polish localization of the original bionicle.com website. N: Yeaah… yeah! E: Ok, you’re familiar! N: [laughing] Yeah, no I remember this! E: Ok!! It was onet.pl, was the… N: Right. E: Ok! Yeah! There is something on that website, that, as far as any current Bionicle fans know, was never on the English-language version. It’s this “Legend.” So it’s split up into 9 chapters. Its sort of like, here’s a story of Tahu, here’s a story of Onua, here’s the legend, here’s how the story ends. Do you recall anything like that? Was that something planned for the English-language website? N: It was not. So. This is also a weird organizational structure thing for lego. E: [laughing] N: lego has the marketing / advertising people, who are headquartered in Billund. They come up with the big ideas on like, “what are the themes going to be around these new toys?” They’re the people who work with Advance. Then, separate from that, there are what are called the ‘markets’ or ‘regions’. Those are basically salespeople. They have to work with the Spanish equivalent of Toys R Us, the Italian equivalent of Toys R Us, or Walmart – [laughing] E: [laughing] yeah! N: Every country has a different important toy store, right? You have to have people in all those countries who have relationships with the toy stores. Also, those people end up coordinating a lot of the local marketing. If you go to Italy, and there’s a commercial for Bionicle, it’s gonna use the same Advance 3D graphics, but it has to be translated into Italian. And then at the end, there’s gonna be a little stinger, that’s like “Buy bionicle at Italian Toys R Us!! It costs this much Lira!!!” E: [giggling] yes! N: Of course, Advance is not gonna make that. It’s gonna be the local Italian LEGO Group that makes that. E: Yeah! N: Those groups - as lego Direct was getting up to speed in New York, and expanding – they all had their own websites. Because what if someone wants to go look up stuff on the Italian internet, about lego? It was this gigantic political battle to get everything under control, and be like, actually, why don’t we have everything at lego.com, and there’ll be a language picker? That’s the modern style, right? Everything is central, but then it’s localized, and you just switch your language. But this was 2001, and that was kind of a new idea back then! Because the internet was getting really big, there were all these Rogue Websites. So onet.pl was the Polish, or - Eastern European, I think it was Eastern European – market. Now, there was not a separate lego Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland… they were too small in terms of sales numbers. So it was like, all of Eastern Europe is under one office. And then they’re like, “well, we need a Polish site, we need a Hungarian site, we need a Czech site” and so forth. They got all these small little web design groups in each country, and onet.pl is one of them. They were like, “hey could you make us a website for Bionicle, we wanna sell a bunch of Bionicle to little kids.” And Leah… I remember onet.pl. Because Leah would lose her shit about them. E: [surprised laughing] N: Because they’re basically just a rogue website! The Legend stuff was never intended to be in English. E: Ok!! N: I think there were probably a bunch of angry emails back and forth about, “Take this down...” E: [whispering] oh my god... N:But it was too late. We didn’t have the whole language picker, everything smooth, like, plugin stuff. And Bionicle was too big of a deal. So it was kind of decreed, like, “Look. Let those sites do their own thing. We have to sell Bionicle to every country.” Leah was sort of powerless to make people stop. But! She would be like, “WHAT are you doing?? Use the official stuff!” I’m pretty sure that those Legends were just copy-and-pasted - and translated into Polish obviously - out of the story bible or something. E: Ok, yeah! N: Probably, in the story bible, to explain to people like me, who – before there was ever an animation of Gali, before I could even see the resin-printed little blue figure of Gali – it was like, who’s Gali? Here’s a little sketch that we drew, and a bio of who Gali is. This is what her personality is like. And we would’ve given that to Templar, to be like, “OK you gotta do chapter 2, it’s all about Gali. And she’s gonna jump out of the water! And do all this cool stuff!!” E: [laughing] N: And she’s like. Cool and Awesome. That was based on that bio that – probably – someone at Advance wrote. Maybe – [laughing] – maybe Christian wrote it. E: Ah, Alastair Swinnerton, whose actually, in the… N: OH, Alastair!! E: Yeah! Oh, so you know him! Ok. N: Yeah yeah yeah. Of course. Yeah, so he probably wrote it, right? And it was probably in the story bible. And probably the lego Eastern Europe marketing division was like, “ok we gotta make websites in Polish, and Hungarian, and Czech, and [laughing] ...Lithuanian, and whatever. So they just sent this stuff out. And onet.pl was like, “cool!” Actually, they were into Bionicle, was my impression! E: Ok! N: Some of these places were like, ope, let’s do another toy website. Copy it, make it look like the other ones. onet.pl was like, “No. We’re gonna Do It.” [both laughing] N: So I think they used more stuff. E: Interesting… N: Yeah they probably got in trouble, but probably nothing was done about it, because, y’know [giggling] E: Yeah. Fair enough! We actually asked Alastair, like “heeey, there’s this Polish thing, do you recognize this?” And he was like, “Well, it kiiinda looks like something I wrote? But it doesn’t seem quite right.” So I don’t know, maybe they were kind of inventing their own stuff [with the bible] as a basis, or like – I don’t know. N: I’m pretty sure they copied it from the story bible that Alastair wrote, and translated it into Polish by themselves. I don’t even think Google Translate was really up and running or good enough at that point. E: Right, yeah. N: So that’s what it probably is. And then probably somebody in the fan community translated it back into English, right? E: Yes! Well, machine-assisted, but y’know. N: Yeah. So that’s why it doesn’t look exactly like one that he wrote [giggling]! E: [laughing] Yeah, that would track! emily annotation: Shortly after this interview took place, images began to circulate of a ‘draft 1’ of the story bible, gifted to the community by Christian Faber. At the time of this writing, the full document has not yet been shared. Nonetheless, this excerpt compared to the onet.pl Legend clearly demonstrates that Naomi is correct as to the Legend’s provenance. E: So there was another thing here. In the first issue of Greg’s comic that came out… N: Yeah? E: ...there was this little blurb. I’m just pulling it up here… so it’s: “Learn how Pohatu, the Toa of Stone, found his first Kanohi Mask... at: bionicle.com/pohatu.” As far as I know, that never actually appeared. Wondering if that rang a bell for you [laughing] N: Pohatu… so that would’ve been I think the third installment of the Mata Nui game, focusing on Pohatu. I’m guessing… hm. The comics that Greg was writing were following the same sequence of like, which village, and which Toa, and Turaga doing their questgiver thing. The third one I remember did focus on Pohatu. I don’t know whether… hm, I’m trying to remember… how he found his first mask. Am I remembering wrong? I thought that the comics… There’s some part of the story - and you probably remember this better than I do at this point – that talks about how all of the Toa get their masks in the first place, right? E: Um… I mean, so the first comic does kind of cover that for Kopaka. N: For Kopaka, ok. E: I think there’s a couple other sort of scattered sources. There was a separate comic, just published in the UK, that talks about Lewa getting his first mask. So it’s kinda spread out over different places. N: Ok, interesting. E: Yeah… nothing for Pohatu. N: Now this is the part where I’m the least certain, because my memory is the fuzziest. E: [laughing] N: Cuz it doesn’t have to do as directly with the website. E: Right. N: Everybody’s trying to tell different parts of this story, right? The most important thing is the Advance 3D animations. The Toa each have their own element, they’re doing badass stuff, and they’ve already got their mask on. Greg and other people are trying to create extra story content around the edges. Obviously Mata Nui online game is focusing a lot on Matorans. E: Yeah! Right. N: We were focusing on the Matorans in part because everyone else had forgotten about them! They were not a big deal. They were created to be a Happy Meal toy. And so we were like, “those are The Guys for the Mata Nui online game.” E: [giggling] N: That turned out to be a good decision! I think it was, again, Peter Mack’s idea. It was really smart! But I think Greg is, I’m guessing, the person who would really know about this. Because I think part of his idea for the comics was to do a prequel, and do an origin story. Because he’s a comic-book-writer, superhero comic guy. He was like, “I wanna show how they got their powers.” [laughing] Like, “oh I got bit by a radioactive spider!” or something. E: Right, yeah! N: For each of them. Now I think the tricky thing was… the one that you mentioned… yeah. So there was one that was in the comic. I think the initial idea was maybe, you’d see those for each Toa. E: Interesting, ok. N: But! It was not popular. E: [laughing] N: This is something I remember. Internally, people were like. “…why are you doing this? This is a bad idea.” E: [giggling] N: Because you’re showing these characters without their mask on. It’s like you’re seeing someone’s skull. And it’s scary! They were like, “we tested the face without the mask with kids, and the kids do not like it… [laughing] ...when the Toa does not have their face on.” Also, they all look like eachother without their masks on! From a marketing point of view, “dont do that” was the message. I suspect that’s why there’s just one comic, or maybe one and a half, where you actually see them finding the mask in the first place. I remember there was a conversation shortly after the launch of all this stuff. Leah was telling me, no, we can’t do that stuff anymore. It may have involved the Mata Nui online game too. “None of this people taking their masks off.” Because its sort of like [pantomiming] augh I lift my face off E: [laughing] yeah. N: Its sort of like, the mask is the face! Y’know the people who were into Bionicle were all like, “no c’mon you guys. That’s not their face, that’s their mask! And if they change their mask, it’d be really cool!” E: Yeah! N: The marketing people, who were not as into the story, not the people from Advance, they were like. “No that is the character’s face. Do not rip the face off.” And they’re sort of right, from like, an ad point of view. I think that’s why the other chapters showing how each Toa got their mask didn’t come out. Also, from what I remember… they’re all kind of similar, right? They’re like. toa is going into their element, facing some… dangerous animal-like creatures made out of Technic pieces. E: Yes… N: And climbing up a lot of rocks. Or going into a volcano. Or y’know, going down swimming into the ocean. Or climbing to the top of a really tall tree. They’re doing one of those things. Then they’re like. “And I found the mask!!!” So they’re all kind of the same. I might have read these at some point. Even though they got shelved. So they may exist, somewhere. I don’t know if they were drawn, or if I just read a script. At some point I think we were like, “oh, you know we could put those on the website! Even if they’re not going to go into the comic, let’s put them on the website!” Our temptation for the web was to be like, “bring us all the lost and forgotten things :) and we’ll give them… another little webpage. Another little webpage.” We were very fan-ish about it, too! E: [giggling] N: But I think that was scrapped, because of the whole face-off thing. That’s my best guess. E: That certainly makes sense! Hey, if you ever find an old script, shoot me a message! [laughing] N: I’m pretty sure that was like, eight laptops ago at this point [laughs] E: Yeah, fair enough. Ok, well I want to be mindful of time, I know you’ve got other stuff coming up and I need to start getting ready to clock in to work. Thank you so much! N: Yeah, my pleasure! E: This was an absolute delight. Quickly before you go, do you have any current work of yours you’d like to plug, for anyone who’s interested in what you are up to? N: Well, given that it’s Bionicle, and it’s still technically a kids’ toy, I should not plug my very adult-themed games. Which I would recommend more to trans gamers than to Bionicle-fan gamers. E: I think there’s probably a trans audience that will be reading this! [annotation: emily winks at the girl reading this :3] N: There probably is, yeah. I’m probably at this point best known for my board game, Consentacle. E: Ok! N: Which is a tentacle sex game. E: [laughs] Great! N: But also, a lot of what I’m doing is helping students with their work. I run the NYU Game Center now, so you can always check them out to see how I’m trying to impart all the stuff that I learned - including from Peter and Leah on the Bionicle game – to another generation of students making adventure games. And going out in the world… New York is still a place where there’s a lot of people doing client work for advertising and education and other things. We train a lot of those people here! [giggles] E: Nice! I saw there was a whole crop of games that were coming out, I guess from the recent graduation. N: That’s right! Every May – so it was a couple weeks ago – we have a ton of new games. E: Very cool. Alright! Again, thank you so much, I will let you go. Thank you and I hope that you have a great day! N: You too! Thank you so much for your interest, emily. It was really nice to be able to talk about it. E: Thank you Naomi! Byeee N: Bye-bye! CreditsMusic used was composed by Dave Madden for the bionicle PC game. My gratitude also goes to: |
N = Naomi Clark 