Recently, as the Ambassador for BioniLUG, I was invited to a roudtable interview session with LEGO Designer Nick Vas, who was the lead designer on 40581 Tahu and Takua, and LEGO Designer Niek van Slagmaat. Joining me was Graham from Blocks Magazine, Eljay from The Three Virtues, Chris from DuckBricks, Aiden from BrickNerd, and Chris from Brick Fanatics. Nick started by giving us a presentation on the development of the set, followed by each of us taking turns to ask some questions. They were even kind enough to share some of the images from the slides for us to share with you. Read on to learn more about the design of this awesome tribute set!

Nick:
I trust that everybody knows why we're here. I don't need to explain too much. There's a Bionicle gift-with-purchase. And it's system based. And it's coming out at the end of this month.SO I'd just like to take people through a little bit of background.

Niek:
We only found out like a week a go that it was going to come out next month or something. We didn't actually know how people were going to buy this product for a longest time. So that's why we're a little bit in the dark as well.

Nick:
But we think we have some answers. So I'm going to jump into a presentation that will take you through some background of where we are today. I hope you enjoy.

So this is just a little bit of a background journey. It's really focusing on the development side of things. I found out very recently why this set happened. I was just asked to make a Bionicle thing within these parameters and tried to figure out how to do the best within those things and wasn't really questioning why it was happening. It's just like, 'we're doing Bionicle - cool! That's, that's awesome!'

Niek:
We were mostly asking ourselves who actually was responsible for creating this brief, and you only found out last week?

Nick:
Yes. I think Bionicle has a fantastic history. And it's an interesting piece within the wider LEGO journey. And it's often misunderstood. But there's also a lot of people within the company that grew up with Bionicle - more and more - and a lot of people that almost secretly love Bionicle. And so I think the gift-with-purchase...

Niek:
Especially the first two, three years. There's a lot of people that, even if they're not hardcore Bionicle fans, they have a really close personal connection to whichever one of the six original Toa or Bohrok that they got way back when.

Nick:
So it's fantastic. Just talking to different people from different parts of the company, there's a lot of people that you wouldn't expect that have some connection Bionicle, and it's often very different for different people, because there's so many different ways that you can be familiar with the franchise that runs so deep.It's fantastic to be able to share that love for Bionicle with with any kind of Bionicle fan, right? And that may be just like, 'I had the red one, you had the white one.' And maybe they didn't even realize that it was LEGO, because it was so big in the early 2000s that it kind of transcended in some ways and on a lot of the Bionicle canisters the LEGO logo was off to the side. Versus you could also talk about the Great Spirit Robot or what Marendar did or something and you can lose people that love Bionicle rightfully so, even a huge fan of Bionicle would have no idea what you're talking about. So when it comes to making a thing that celebrates Bionicle it became a very interesting question of, 'How can we go about that to try and reach as many people as possible and celebrate some of the history of it?' And doing that within what we can do toda, and trying to use what we can do today as an opportunity to do something different that we haven't done before. Knowing that there's so many different ways that you can engage with the Bionicle hobby so we won't be able to make it perfect for everybody, because you often have directly opposing views on what is the perfect thing. Should it be Tahu or should it be Lewa..?

Niek:
Should it be System or should be entirely made out of Technic pieces?

What Nick is trying to say is, it was quite a process of getting to something that everybody agreed would be something that would be recognizable but also fun for hardcore LEGO fans. Because we also know that there's a 'big red one' kind of thing going on, where it's always like, 'well, you know, the red one!' That's the one everybody knows, the one that was on all of the posters and everything. So we know that this is another one of the red ones, but the interpretation here is entirely new. I think that's what we, me personally at least, are excited about.

Nick:
So this is a couple of photos of designer MOCs essentially. These are things that have been made within the company over the years that are just from people that love Bionicle and wanted to make something fun. Often it's sort of like a product or it's a version of the thing. It's something that could be pretty easy to do like a brick mosaic kind of thing. So it's a bunch of 'what-if' concepts. We have a lot of those floating around.

So when it came to this gift-with-purchase, this was one of the things that I was thinking about during development - just like that Bionicle kid, the archetypical kid that got Bionicle was 7 to 12 when Bionicle launched and became a pop culture phenomenon. In 2023, the math says they will now be around 29 to 34 years old, which is kind of uncomfortable. But it means that there's a lot of people out there in this age range that deep down in their subconscious know the red one and know probably the color they had as a kid.

Niek:
There was a crazy statistic that you found, before we started this process, about how the Bohrok when they launched out numbered the amount of children in New Zealand?

Nick:
No,I think it was one in two kids.

Niek:
So one in two kids had at least one Bohrok?

Nick:
Yeah. And it was just a fact in one of the magazines. Like thinking back to my childhood, one in two of my friends had them.

At the beginning of this gift-with-purchase journey was the retail shopper team that's responsible for determining what kinds of gifts-with-purchase would we like to do for upcoming years. So there have been a couple of nostalgia-related sets. I believe it was the gift-with-purchase team that noticed that the LEGO Ideas fan vote previously led to the 90th anniversary castle and spaceship sets. And they were like, 'Why isn't there a Bionicle one?' They asked if we could we do Bionicle gift-with-purchase? Would that be a possibility? And really wanted to see if we can use the original models, can we make it out of out of Technic in some way? So there was an investigation that was done into what pieces are still available? Is it conceivable: could we just have the original Tahu Mata or something like that? Unfortunately, most of the pieces in the original Tahu Mata don't exist anymore.

Niek:
Most pieces, generally, for Bionicle are all gone.

Nick:
There's a couple here and there, but there's not enough to make a cohesive, full re-release of a thing for a gift-with-purchase where usually there isn't the opportunity to make a new mold specifically for such a limited thing. But we investigated if it could be done, and it turned out that it wouldn't be possible in the original format. Then the question became, 'could it be done with system bricks?' But the reason that it was investigated is because one of the marketing managers just loved Bionicle and grew up with Bionicle as a kid. So we were thinking of, 'what is a good set that you could potentially build with your kid as well?' And then you could share the LEGO that you had as a kid and you could share that experience with with your children. Bionicle is one of those because that's the thing so many young adults had as a kid.

Niek:
People that grew up with Bionicle are old enough to have kids now.

Nick:
So it began from that love of Bionicle within the gift-with-purchase team of this cool franchise that we had: 'Why don't we try and do something?' And then that ended up connecting to myself and a few other designers who had just been making lots of random Bionicle things and sharing them with people like, 'Hey, what about this? What about this?' Often it's about finding the right time and place. So here was an opportunity where the gift-with-purchase team was looking to make a Bionicle-related thing. So what could we do within this kind of size and within this kind of scale? We drafted up a few concept directions for that, and I was just like:

'I'm being asked to work on Bionicle. I'm not going to ask many questions. I'm just going to start doing it! I don't know why you want this, but what about Tahu and Takua as two small figures? What about a slightly bigger Takanuva? What about six, individual Toa?'

Niek:
But that touches on the idea that when you were tasked to make this, you were tasked to make something that that would be recognizable to not-hardcore Bionicle fans, and then including Takua in there is an extra for people that specifically are the deeper lore fans because Takua is just generally a very well loved character.

Nick:
Whereas with the Great Spirit Robot, as fantastic as that is, there's a lot of people that rightfully love Bionicle and have no idea what the Great Spirit Robot is because they dropped out in 2003.

Niek:
Or maybe they just didn't look at Bionicle on the Internet. And then you could have even bought the last sets and be like, 'I don't know who this grey guy is.'

Nick:
That's completely possible. So then we had Takanuva just putting all that $20-to-30-ish price point into one figure to see how could we make an articulated figure using using system pieces. This is definitely pushing the limit of what could be done as well. It's sort of like exploring out this possibility, but also knowing that it was sort of working up against limitations. Here we've invested all of the newness in that we'd like to have a mask here too. But we have to work within all the colors that happened to be available that aren't specific to an IP, so Takanuva was a great option because white is generally quite, quite versatile. Some of the other characters in more unusual colors would be harder to do authentically without the full budget to make lots of color changes. Thirdly, we have this Toa Mata team. We explored versions with stickers for faces but these are brick built ones where it's super minimal and abstract to see how well you can capture the expression of the Toa Mata team, because that was also an iconic thing. But it means that they're all quite small, but there's a neat style that came out of it in the end. I think George Gilliatt made these ones.

Niek:
Very much a desk toy direction, the kind of thing where you can take your favorite one to work or something.

Nick:
This one would just arbitrarily apply two color changes for two of the limbs.

Niek:
Because you don't have Technic connectors in that many colors.

Nick:
It would just be purely by coincidence that it would work out like an interesting sliding puzzle that you have to work within. So we shared those concepts with the gift-with-purchase team and asked if they were interested in any of these directions, which is really for me like a no-lose scenario, because all of them are Bionicle-themed. And they said yes to one of them -they said yes to this Tahu and Takua. So it was like, 'Awesome, that's great!' Something else fantastic that happened is that often gifts-with-purchase don't have unique decorations but that was something that we were able to get for these nostaliga sets. So the Blacktron had the unique minifigure and then this one has two unique printed decorations. Essentially for this brief I knew that I had two new things I could play around with, so each of those concepts was trying to use those two new things in an effective way. And it was a sliding puzzle of which things can I get the most value out of? And masks seemed like a great place to spend that.

At this point, the concept is more or less fully formed, it's iterated quite quickly on the model side. Then a lot more focus was spent on refining the tiny details. And then the graphics and packaging was where a lot of extra love was spent, which was also fantastic, because that's usually outside of our domain. It was because the graphic designer Ashwin [Visser] was working on the graphics of these and he loves doing remakes of things and he also had Bionicle as a kid. So it was great to talk about his experience with Bionicle, which was just a couple of sets, I think some of the Nuva sets, not all the depth of lore and stuff. He was asking me questions on like, what color should the eyes be? What shape should this be? And I gave him very complicated answers like, 'it's very important that Tahu's eyes are pink, not orange.' Also for the packaging, it was a similar situation where some of the packaging designers had worked on the original Bionicle packaging, and then others also had Bionicle as a kid. They were really excited to do a little bit extra for this little little thing where we can iterate in a bit of a weird way.

This slide is used to explain the brief of, 'what can we do for these masks?' We're taking Tahu, we're taking Takua, that had these forms. And there were the comics that interpreted thjem one way and there was also this variant cover that interpreted it quite a bit differently. So given that we're interpreting it into system, how could we go about translating it, like it shouldn't necessarily be one to one. Here's a some of the imagery that I was using to sort of set the tone that these are sillier and smaller characters. They're more cartoony and blocky with system. Can we look a little bit more at MNOG and like some of the more cartoony expressions that Bionicle has also had and also to fan art as well? There's so much fantastic stuff that people have done online that is taking characters in new directions - could we be thinking about that for these masks? This was another chart illustrating taking this face and turning into this face. We're taking this sculpted, very serious looking face - how does that translate to the bow, because it's not just, 'take the exact same things and squeeze it on'? Could we be doing something more simplified and cartoony? I also had these as well, just a lot of hand sketches. A lot of the MNOG flash graphics were an inspiration for Takua's mask, and I think we ended up settling on something that would work as a general Pakari rather than going specifically for Takua's Pakari. We had this initial exploration of just taking the front-on view of the mask and pasting it on, and that didn't work at all. It was kind of like the mask as a decoration on the piece. But then it's also on the whole plastic. So instead, can we design the decoration so that it's filling out so that the whole thing is the mask? One of those was trying to line up the eyes with the studs behind it, and then try and adjust the proportions to fit from there.

Niek:
Which adds to the fun that if you take the mask off, specifically Takua, you can actually see his beady little eyes, right?

Nick:
Yeah, those are the eyes. So in the original, they hold on to the mask by their mouth, and now they hold on to the mask by their eyeballs.

Niek:
Very uncomfortable.

Nick:
I feel like they're equally valid. Then we went through a lot of exploration and innovation like: Could we go more blocky? Could we go more angular? Could we go more serious? What are the shapes of the eyes on the inside? Tahu had a lot more iteration in the details - it's a very challenging shape to translate onto the mask. It's also tricky, because I don't feel like there's any right answer here. I'm super happy with how it's turned out, but also excited to see people take an interpretation on that as well. There's many ways that it could be done differently. There's also the question of, 'What do the other masks look like?' It's something that we've explored a little bit, but we're excited to see the fan community run with this format. Ashwin was so kind as to just print sticker versions when I asked, 'Hey, could you make Takua's mask in black, please, with green eyes, just for... reasons?' It was also fantastic to be able to take this thing that's been made around to other fans in the company. Like Corvin from the City team is another Bionicle fan who gave some input on sketches for how we could try doing the face, and then we'd relay that back to Ashwin and try it out.

At that point we have the complete-ish version of the set with the graphics and all the different details in it. I don't know why I made this diagram, I think it was just for fun, because it's needlessly explanatory on what these things are. This was like the brief for packaging - Bionicle has this fantastic plastic packaging that wouldn't have been an option for a gift-with-purchase set. But is there a way that we can pay homage to it, what elements can we sort of take and draw from? So I prepared a couple of examples of old graphics. There were these posters that were inside the sets and while there wasn't one for Takua we can still take inspiration from that, and we had a lot of the original assets. In the packaging material there was a lot of drawing from the original assets, which creates a quite a charming mixture to it. Sometimes you'd expect this to be done slightly differently, but it's just the original juxtaposed with the new set.

Niek:
So it's like a really weird time capsule, and then you throw a new LEGO thing into it. And you're like, 'What?'

Nick:
Yeah, it was was fantastic. As we were developing it, there would be a Bionicle logo and we'd ask the packaging team if they could switch it to another Bionicle logo because they had picked the 2003 one but we wanted the 2001 one. It was fantastic that through the development process a lot of people humored us, and that's not always the case. George mocked up a version of the packaging for fu,n since at the time we didn't know if we would have special packaging, so we were quite excited of what it would look like on the adults black background layout. It became a premium little Tahu presentation. But we thought it would be cool if we had this original box design, and what ended up being made is a really cool version of that. It was just drawing from a lot of the original catalogs and stuff.

Niek:
I'm excited how close it actually gets to the original because it gives me weirdly the same brain feel. It's really weirdly nostalgic to see it - a new product with this packaging design and my brain is making the connections being like, 'Oh boy, oh boy it's Bionicle! I remember Bionicle, it was great!' So I think that's super cool. I think it's amazing how good of a job they did in making everything feel authentic to the original.

Nick:
Even to the point of... This is a prototype box of the original layout, and it's super weird, because this is a 3D rendering because it's preliminary. We actually have photos for this box, which is kind of a rare thing for Bionicle. The preliminary renders actually looked great, because it really matched the 2001 render quality. There's a shadow an the arc going across the box, but in the original packaging the shadow is going the other way, and they changed that to match, which was like, 'Wow, I didn't expect that!' I really appreciate that level of detail.

We also had the opportunity to write something extra in the booklet. So I reached out to Greg Farshtey, to see if he'd be interested to write a message to the fans in this booklet, and he was super enthusiastic to do that. Which I was super grateful for. He was like, 'Whatever you need, however long it needs to be, I can figure something out.' That was early, early in last year. But a couple of months later, I found out that Greg was unfortunately being let go from the company, and then he subsequently still wrote the message, which again, I'm super appreciative of that he was still willing to do that. And he just wrote this fantastic message. In the booklet his name is unfortunately typoed, which I feel really terrible about. I'm super sorry that that happened. It was something that just wasn't caught - we noticed it too late in the process and we were unfortunately not able to correct it. But I'm still really happy that that message is there and I hope people appreciate it. I'm eager to see what the what the fan response will be to this product in general.

Niek:
We haven't seen any fan response yet.

Nick:
It speaks a lot how this whole development process has just been a weird glitch in the system that happened because of a lot of people's love for the franchise in many different ways. So it's a little expression of that, and a thank you to the community. Which I think that Greg's message really encompasses it better than I can. It's been a fun little project to work on and I'm very excited to see how the fan community responds to it.

Niek:
I think what's also interesting is the fact that because of this love for Bionicle permeating throughout multiple different departments, normally, we don't actually work that closely with packaging design. It's something that often we get feedback rounds, but that's about it. Normally you don't actually get to talk to marketing manager to come up with a brief and stuff. I think it's neat that because of this very strange product, we ended up almost journeying across the company and talking to a whole bunch of people that we don't normally get to talk to.

Nick:
It was a reason to reach out to Greg even.

Graham (Blocks Magazine):
As a point of clarification Niek, were you involved in the actual model development or did you just bounce off ideas?

Niek:
I got asked to sit in on this meeting just to have more people. I built some sketches - I built a surfboard for him, that's one of the sketches that I did. But also in last six or so years Nick and I have been going crazy building mini ball joint kind of Bionicle-esque figures. So this product is very close to something that we have been playing around with for a long time.

Nick:
Despite being the designer working on this, it was very much a hive mind thing where we're all keeping ourselves in check and getting opinions on we think fans would respond to this.

Niek:
And that is because we acknowledge the Bionicle is something very different to many different people.

Nick:
There were a lot of the moments along the process such as when I had like a mask design, I would just take it to somebody I know is a Bionicle fan and show it to them and just get their read on how they'd react to it as a sense check.

Niek:
So I didn't do any of the hard work, but I'm here for the for the PR tour.

Graham (Blocks Magazine):
Could each of you share your earliest memory of Bionicle from childhood?

Nick:
I think I was downstairs in my father's office and he bought me a Pohatu canister. And I was just like, 'This is really cool!' And from that point forwards, I didn't play with LEGO anymore, I just played with Bionicle. I think that's one of my earliest memories, like everything else before that wasn't relevant.

Graham (Blocks Magazine):
What was it about it that hooked you?

Nick:
I have no idea - I was very young. I don't know if I had objective opinions at that point. I still don't know.

Niek:
For me, I had an extremely LEGO experience as my first Bionicle experience. It was seeing I think it was a TV commercial of the original Toa Mata as they came out. As a kid, you can't just go to the store and buy it, so I immediately went upstairs to my room and built Lewa out of pieces from my Jungle Slizer set from the wave that came out before, the kind of prototype Bionicle. I made an axe of system pieces for him, and that was my first real Bionicle experience even before buying a product.

Eljay (TTV):
Obviously enough, this goes to quite an extensive length to replicate the original as closely as possible in this new way. That being the case, the Mixel joints are gray. Was there any chance of recoloring them? Or are those for everything going to be grey?

Nick:
I guess so, yeah.

Niek:
It feels very cathartic to be able to say this, whenever I see anybody comment about it I want to scream through a microphone that we can't - we're physically incapable of doing it for quality reasons. They are very specific and they carry such a specific amount of strength and in order to keep those tolerances as tight as possible, we are limiting them to just two colors. Two colors that we know will work well and will give the LEGO experience.

Nick:
So in this instance, no, it's not possible. I didn't even try, didn't even consider. But hypothetically, if it was possible, it still would have been a trade off between the printed masks and two of the ball joints in other colors, which isn't a possibility. There's multiple things that are trading up against it. I wasn't trying to replicate the visuals as faithfully as possible. There are things that could be there - it probably could have had a gear function, but then that would have made it much bigger. I think the final product has got a lot of details that are replicating the original, but I was still trying to adapt it into system bricks. So this is a more cartoony interpretation of it. And it's knowing that there'll be the grey ball joints in isolation and hopefully it's okay even though the original didn't have that. Takua I think is more liberal. It probably could have been closer to a McToran, but then it wouldn't have had the backpack.

Niek:
And it wouldn't have been as goofy. There was a version that didn't have back back, but because of MNOG and who he is, it makes sense for him to have a backpack.

Nick:
Yes, and how those noodle arms 'just work' was so funny. We didn't explore how to make the arms more accurate.

Niek:
One of the really dumb things that you discover when you become a LEGO designer is that you need to be super careful with which pieces to include in the same bag. Which I think leads to my favorite detail about Takua, because the McToran have two different hands. Nick wanted to replicate that by having two different clips for him, which in any other LEGO set normally is an absolute no-go because kids will immediately put on the wrong one. Statistically it has been proven to have a 50/50 chance that they will pick the wrong one. So it's very funny that Nick did actually include those. And the good part is it doesn't matter which clip they put on because they'll have the other clip for the other hand. I think that's it's a very dumb detail to like, but I think it's very funny, becauseit goes directly to him holding his disc as well.

Nick:
There was one that is based on the Mask of Life Takua.

Eljay (TTV):
That is haunting.

Nick:
I think it just didn't adapt well to any other character, or himself.

Eljay (TTV):
Absolutely, if it was any closer to the original McToran, it just would have been stiff. On the subject of articulation, you guys showed some concept models, and because I'm sure this is going to come up: was ankle articulation ever considered? Or was the general consensus to leave it out to get the set in that pose?

Nick:
I gave you knee articulation, what more do you want? And hip articulation! (*Laughing*) It was done in the interest of trying to simplify it a little bit, because there are a lot of complex details in it as well. We figured out this cool, clean build that's just satisfying to put together.

Niek:
The shape of the calf is also really cool. It ties into some of the same things you see with the Marvel mechs as well, where when they moved away from using tons of mini ball joints, they become much more expressive in the fact that you can actually build the limbs in a way that's shaped to look like a limb instead of a chain of mini ball joint pieces.

Nick:
The other thing I really loved is that went hand-in-hand kind with this is we ended up with the way that you could snap him onto the lava board. By not having ankle articulation it makes that feel so much better because otherwise he'd just be pivoting immediately at the base. I don't know if I built a version that had ankle articulation just because I was really happy with this version. It felt cool so I wanted to do it like this.

Eljay (TTV):
This set is commemorative, this is celebrating the theme, and the community, and it is excellent in that. As Bionicle fans, could you ever see yourselves content with this being on a broader scale? Creating more Bionicle figures or even an entire line in this style? Or would you want it to go in a different direction?

Nick:
I don't know if I'm necessarily the correct person to answer the question, because I think we all have different hopes and ambitions for what could be nice. I don't want to speak for all, even all LEGO designers that like Bionicle. I think for my involvement I was excited to just make this a really cool, self-contained thing and make the best commemorative thing. And whatever happens beyond that? I don't know. I'm excited for where the fan community takes this. The reason that this exists is just a special one-off commemorative thing that somehow happened. I still don't entirely understand it. It's not meant to be read as LEGO testing the waters. It's just, 'Here's a cool thing. Enjoy it!'

Jordan:
Nick, you kind of mentioned it a little bit earlier that you were really excited about the Classic 90th anniversary set and what people did with the Tahu from that, and you were talking earlier about how you were excited about seeing what people will do in recreating the other Toa based on this design.

Nick:
This is like a weird walrus,and I think this is a bug of some kind. I was just playing around with the idea of what alternate models would look like from from these bricks.

Niek:
But these are alternate models, right? From the set?

Nick's favorite model is the Fikou spider from Bionicle so you have some context. This is why he wants this.

Nick:
And by extension, the Master Builder Set. So the idea is that people could build more things in this universe.

Niek:
That's what I'm most excited about, the fact that the Bionicle universe is so wide. This is like teaching somebody the very first steps of a different language, basically, and seeing where it evolves into. This is what Tahu looks like. And then you decide what's next.

Nick:
Exactly. It's not to say that the Bionicle-system or System-system is better. It's just showing that you can make cool things and I'm hoping that people will give it a go and be inspired to try making more stuff. Particularly like all these other creatures, you don't actually need the masks, so you can just start building with the pieces that you just have at home already. You can build in the style - I hope people do that in the same way that people ran with it with the 90th anniversary Tahu.

Chris (DuckBricks):
Let's say for example, in a hypothetical world where Bionicle was made into the the $400 90th anniversary set. There's been a lot of debate as to what exactly that topic could be. I'm really curious if you have any ideas: let's say you're given a prompt with the same exact restrictions, you can make one new mold, and that's it. What would be your pick for a for a $400 dollar set to celebrate Bionicle's history?

Nick:
We've definitely considered a lot of options. This like hypothetical situation talk is what we do in our spare time. I think I think it depends entirely on the parameters. If it was $400 and one new piece? I don't know, it's a bit weird. Could you build something out of Technic? You'd probably have to explore that because one new piece is only going to go so far. I don't know some of the best ideas of how to use one piece I'd probably like to do in the future. So I don't want to tell.

Chris (DuckBricks):
Fair enough. What was the decision made to use specifically Mixel joints as opposed to say SCCBS or the fixed limbs style of pieces? Or maybe even if there's any CCBS parts still remaining in circulation? Was there ever any consideration to use that and do something more in the older style of constraction? Maybe not Bionicle G1, certainly, but something along those lines versus deciding on going with the Mixel joints for this system?

Nick:
That happened right at the beginning. That was something that was explored of what pieces still remain, and then is it possible to build something with the ones that are out there. And it just really wasn't enough to make anything that was close. It may have been like, there is this particular socket here, but then it doesn't matter if a lot of the other pieces aren't. So all of the options were considered simultaneously in the three sketches. This is what it would look like if it was this size. If it's this size, this works well for it.

Niek:
I can speak towards the Mata as SCCBS. I think we talked about having it be built in that style but I think because this is an 18+ product, we want to just make it special. SCCBS would really have clashed with the color blocking that that you were hoping to get with this guy. Also some of the posture and proportions because they're quite lanky, which is why I think it was a better case not to use it.

Nick:
It's the same with the superheroes faceplate. It is double the size so the whole set would need to be double the size to make it proportional.

Niek:
We have a bunch of them with Sharpie drawings of Tahu's mask on it.

Nick:
I think just about every single piece that we have that can be decorated, we tried to draw a Hau on it. Like, is this the one? Is this it?

Chris (DuckBricks):
I'm kind of curious regarding some of the other models like the six mini Toa and Takanuva - is there any possibility that you would be releasing more images of them, or digital files? I'm sure a lot of folks, including myself, in the Bionicle community and beyond, would really love to recreate them and even put them up for like review and stuff like that. Is there any chance that we'd be able to see any alternate images of those to be able to recreate them?

Nick:
When we shared those images, the intention wasn't for people to build them and review them as official models, because they are just sketches. They're what-ifs. So they're not refined to the same level. A lot of them you wouldn't expect to necessarily hold together as well, because they haven't gone through the development process. But I understand, I know people will try and reverse engineer them. But they are what-ifs as well, especially those early ones, those are just things we made for fun. So I hope they're seen as that.

Andrew (BioniLUG):
Other than the masks, what would you say was the hardest element from Tahu to capture at that scale with the System bricks?

Nick:
The mask was definitely the hardest because nothing seemed quite quite right and we kept iterating on it.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the back. There's a clip on a bow on the back of it now. But it was like, 'What kinds of pieces could represent gears?' There are ways to build the gear on the back, but then I also really wanted Takua to be able to attach on the back. It was deciding which arbitrary piece captures the vibe of what might be happening on his back, if not the gears that would be sticking out to get in the way of Takua. I ended up eventually settling on this because Takua can also hold on to that, so there's more poses there. But there was really no right answer. It's a very arbitrary thing to hyper focus on. In the prototype version the pins on the side are red, which I decided to go away from because that works nicely for Tahu, but then maybe not for the rest of the Toa. And then there's another hinge plate in the back there that's kind of the shape, but it's also a bit of a waste to have a hinge plate that's not hinging in the model. It was a lot of back and forth over it. The hardest bits were the ones that didn't actually matter at all.

Andrew (BioniLUG):
What would you say was your favorite part of the final model?

Nick:
Takua, he's just so adorable, and you can just keep playing with him in new ways like he can hold his backpack.

Niek:
He's very expressive.

Nick:
He can express a lot: He can sit down quite nicely. He can step. He can lean backwards. He can look up. Hou can do all sorts of things that the McToran could not. You can take his mask off. You can put the mask on Tahu. You can swap them around you can also swap the mask on to classic 90th anniversary Tahu as well, if you're so inclined. I'm really happy that it just coincidentally worked out that you can get all the colors kind of matching. We weren't able to make it in medium blue, we just didn't have to right pieces available but I was happy with that because I prefer this blue personally.

Andrew (BioniLUG):
I love the the model and am so happy to see that you were able to make this happen!

Nick:
Thanks, it was a lot of fun to make it. It's a bit of a weird dream.

Niek:
It's weird being asked to do it, normally have to push to do things related to Bionicle.

Aiden (BrickNerd):
Could you enlighten us any more on the process behind getting this idea to become a thing? Who originally thought of it? Did you guys reach out to them or did they reach out to you? Were you picked based off your history with Bionicle or did they pick you for other reasons?

Nick:
It's definitely known that several people like Bionicle.

Niek:
There's like a Bionicle shortlist in the building. It's not written, but people know, because Bionicle fans, as it turns out, will not stopped talking about Bionicle. I've been at the company for seven years now, and I now know what it is like to be on a team where somebody joins that really likes Bionicle, and they just start talking to everybody on the team about Bionicle.

Nick:
Yeah, they'll just be like, 'Hey, do you want to talk about Bionicle?' And I wonder if I was like that when I started.

But this is very much just a case of many things lining up at the same time. For one reason or another, you could have a great idea, but it might not happen right now because of this completely detached thing. Often it's like, 'We need a gift with purchase at this particular size, for this particular time.' And it may be that this anniversary lines up near that so things often come together through happenstance. And this was several happenstances of people just having that genuine love for Bionicle that all lined up at the right point in time that somehow made this happen.

Jordan:
Nick and I recently met with the gift-with-purchase team and they were telling us that they didn't think it was actually going to happen. These two people on the team were like, 'Oh, this would be fun!' And the fact that it actually made it this far was pretty special for them. You could really feel the emotion of them talking.

Nick:
We felt the same way.

Aiden (BrickNerd):
What are your thoughts on continuing forward with system-built action figure sets and the doors that opens as opposed to doing things more as the original Bionicle with customized molds?

Nick:
I think there's a lot of different strengths and weaknesses to them. I grew up with Bionicle. I love that. And then as it ended, I transitioned into learning about System and somehow ended up here, where I now work with System but have a weird Bionicle background to bring to the table. In Bionicle there's no 'up.' And you have to squint at every piece to understand what it could be, because every piece is so specific, like, 'That's a foot.' So you have no option but to use the pieces creatively in order to build other stuff, compared to System which has this different layering of 'generic' bricks versus 'specialized' bricks, and a lot more thinking of, 'How do I build up this thing in a directional way?' You can play to the strengths of the different systems, so there are things that System can do better and then there are things that Constraction can do better. And then the G1 Bionicle system is a different expression again. Galidor can do things that a lot of other things can't do, but it's a very niche expression as well. So in the System mech space there's a lot that can be explored, but it is different to what you can do with Constraction. So I think it's nice when we can embrace those differences to bring the strengths out of them.

Aiden (BrickNerd):
Do you do at least hope to see or expect to see more action figures type sets similar to this or some of the Marvel sets to be released in the future to fill the niche that Bionicle had?

Nick:
You can see the Marvel mechs are happening. Ninjago has a ton of mechs. Niek has that well covered.

Niek:
I think it's hard to fill the niche that Bionicle covered because it's very much a product of its time. It's hard to replicate something that is so abstract in nature where what we do these days is extremely explicit.

Nick:
Also to that, when you say, 'covers the niche of Bionicle,' there's also the massive swirling story and mystery of it. There's so many different reasons to love Bionicle. It's really hard to say that this thing fills the niche of Bionicle...

Niek:
...or 'system x' in general. I think what we can aspire to do is try and take the aspects that we liked about Bionicle and try and bring them in different ways, whether it's the story or the building system. That's why I've been hard at work in Ninjago, to try and create pieces that both allow us to build things easier for kids, but also inspire them. It's the same thing I said about what this set could represent for a Bionicle universe built out of LEGO bricks, what introducing system based mech/character pieces - it can inspire people to move on - to take that and extrapolate. I'm all about building systems and creativity. So that's one of the things that we're trying to take away with Ninjago, design, at least, I'm not super involved in the TV show. But from a designer's perspective, I really try and take a lot of those elements and just try and create things that can inspire people to move forward.

Nick:
The way that the Bionicle universe was open and inspired you to make your own riffs on those things, that's something that constantly I'm trying to bring into the things that I work on. It may have a very different expression, like it's not immediate that this was inspired by Bionicle, but it definitely is.

Chris (Brick Fanatics):
You said that you've been building characters with Mixel joints for years. Are there any particular lessons that you took from those years of practice, or any particular design rules that might not be obvious to us as fans?

Nick:
Subconsciously, I guess? There's probably a lot of things I didn't try because I had already tried it in a completely different model.

Niek:
From my perspective, less is more. I try and build with pieces as simple and straightforward as possible, because when you're building with Mixel joints, you have to keep it relatively small. You really try to use LEGO elements that are like primordial LEGO pieces, like the fingers used here. We try to find a piece that does something really, really well and then just stick to it. This forearm is literally five pieces. I think there lies a lot of Bionicle's essence - complexity through simplicity. Just having as little things going on as possible, but have each piece really speak to its own function.

Nick:
If you look at the original image of the 'for-fun' version of this model, there's arm pistons coming off the sides and stuff, every little spot that there could be something I was just throwing spaghetti on the wall of like, 'What about elbow rockets?' I love elbow rockets, but I know they weren't in Tahu, so although I would have loved to put them in ultimately he doesn't have them, he just has a flame sword.

« Return to News