Happy New Year, BIONICLE fans! On January 1st, 2001, the first chapter of Mata Nui: The Online Game was released to the public… and on January 1st, 2022, we’re releasing a demo of our restoration!
As those of you familiar with your BIONICLE history already know, MNOG was originally released one chapter at a time, with the first chapter allowing the player to explore the beach of Ta-Wahi, watch the Legend of Mata Nui cutscene, and briefly see Tahu walking towards the Charred Jungle. With help from the BioMedia Project team, Wall of History has begun restoring this original release, and we’re now ready to share a demo with the community.
This project has been envisioned for a long time, and is finally possible thanks to the amazing Ruffle team, who have developed a Flash emulator in Rust. Ruffle is installed on Wall of History itself, meaning you’ll be able to play MNOG on the site using any browser, without having to install any plugins yourself!
This project is still in its infancy, but we were too excited to keep it under wraps any longer — and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make this first chapter available on its anniversary! Several changes still need to be made to make this demo perfectly match the original release, some of which may not even be possible due to old assets being lost to time. However, we’re going to do everything we can to make it match as closely as possible, and have even contacted Templar about recovering unavailable assets.
This first demo can be accessed here. In the coming months, we’ll be making further tweaks and improvements to this chapter one restoration, as well as begin releasing restorations of subsequent chapters. Keep an eye on the Wall of History Twitter for more news, and have a happy 2022!
4 Comments
[…] sense to start where it all began — with Mata Nui: The Online Game. On the first of this year, we announced an MNOG restoration project, which would recreate the original nine chapters of the game as […]
[…] Two of the Skybound Update will continue our Flash restoration project announced at the start of this year — we’ll be releasing more restored chapters of Mata Nui: […]
I’ve checked demo and found one thing that I think should be fixed: When you’ll finish watching animation with stones, ambient music begins to play. If you’ll play same animation again, before ambient music ends, both tracks: ambient music and music from animation will overlap. This is not a particularly big problem, but it is a flaw on really good piece of art 😉
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I’ll certainly look into it, though it is worth mentioning that those particular files weren’t modified for this release (so this may be an issue with Flash itself rather than any specific aspect of implementation).