Happy 20^th Anniversary to Mask of Destiny from Mark (aka “Mark of MoD” and “RedQuark”)! If you don’t know who I am (or even if you do), I was Mask of Destiny’s fourth (I believe) official staff member and longest-serving contributing editor in its first decade. I regret that I cannot pinpoint at what time I first joined and when I left, and after reviewing the archived news posts, I am convinced that some of Purple Dave’s posts have since been mistakenly ascribed to me, so unfortunately that does not definitively nail it down either. I can say that the first post I absolutely know is mine is the carved pumpkin from November 2, 2001. The last could very well be from twelve years ago marking Mask of Destiny’s eighth anniversary.

I beg your pardon, but I do need to start off by sending out a big “Thank you!” to a great many people. First off, to Purple Dave for allowing me to come aboard almost twenty years ago. Although it took a while for me to officially join, I had been following BIONICLE closely from the launch of the MataNui.com teaser site in December of 2000, and I had been sending correspondence to Purple Dave and Mask of Destiny as an enthusiastic reader almost from the very beginning.

I also need to thank Philip Wise of RebelScum.com for launching MaskOfDestiny.com, and for supporting it and us for many, many years. And I cannot possibly thank Richard/Imatron enough for joining me at Mask of Destiny when I needed his assistance the most. Imatron single-handedly kept the site going throughout most of its life.

My thanks to the many new people at Mask of Destiny who have reached out and asked me to contribute to this 20^th Anniversary celebration. I genuinely appreciate this opportunity to share my thoughts with you all again and to once more wear the appellation ”Mark of MoD”.

I can’t forget all of the lovely people of The LEGO Group or working with The LEGO Group, either with a partner company or on their own, who took the time to speak with me and answer my questions over the years. People like Greg Farshtey, Cathy Hapka, Peter Mack, and Jason Michas, to name just a few.

I would not have been able to spend so much time contributing to Mask of Destiny if it were not for the support of my loving family. My wife and boys not only put up with my cross-country quests for BIONICLE exclusives, but they often actively participated in them.

And finally, I cannot possibly thank you enough, you the readers of Mask of Destiny, for your time and attention. BIONICLE and Mask of Destiny have allowed me to meet and communicate with so many of you wonderful people over the years. Your words of appreciation, offers of assistance, and over-all enthusiasm have always meant a great deal to me and continue to lift my spirits to this day.

I realized as I started writing this that I really have much more to write about than fits into one article, so in this article I am going to try to focus on what makes BIONICLE so special. BIONICLE was the lucky offspring of the very over-expansion of The LEGO Group that almost brought about its demise. The brilliant multimodal omnichannel promotional blitz that launched the property was a reflection of LEGO trying to expand its horizons beyond its construction toy confines out into a wider media world.

This meant BIONICLE was everywhere from stores of every type and size with its inexpensive grab-and-go canister-based Toa figures, to the Flash-based Mata Nui Online Game, to hybrid music/computer CDs, to comic books, to skateboarding events, to shoes, to Game Boy Advance games, to posters, to school book covers, and on and on. This ubiquity meant almost everyone would come into contact with BIONICLE at some point in 2001 and eventually ask the question ”Is this LEGO?”

Another factor that favored BIONICLE and almost doomed the company was its designers’ penchant for new and unique pieces. Although clearly beholden to its TECHNIC origins — particularly with the Rahi sets — the vast majority of the action figure pieces were completely (and necessarily) new.

But much of what made BIONICLE so special was its mystery, born of a desire to surround a new intellectual property with a story that would support it for years. The name BIONICLE is an enticing enigma itself, one without which it does not seem its success would have been possible.

Nothing highlights that mystery quite like the brilliant 3D-realistic computer-generated animations that Ghost did for the company, featuring the Toa arriving from the sky and plunging into the ocean in their canisters. This use of packaging as story element, or possibly vice versa, is nothing short of absolutely brilliant. And then the resulting dichotomy of these robotic creatures arriving on and exploring a pristine tropical island just adds to the mystery.

The world-building also got an enormous boost from the cultural appropriation of the peoples of the Pacific islands, and in particular the use the Māori language as the basis for characters’ and creatures’ names. That you could hop on the web, find a translator, and discover that Pohatu actually meant stone was a revelation. Even the ensuing brouhaha over the use of Tohunga as the name for the characters now known as the Matoran kept BIONICLE in the news, and as the saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity. (To their credit, The LEGO Group did resolve the issue admirably.) But putting that aside, grounding these fantastical fictional characters in an exotic, real-world language gave them some literary weight that they would not have otherwise had.

Along with Ghost’s promotional videos, the BIONICLE website, and the comics, the bulk of the story-telling in the first year was carried by Templar Studio’s unprecedented Mata Nui Online Game. This serial interactive experience was necessarily more cartoonish, both in style and tone, than the other representations of Mata Nui, but no less important in setting the mood and providing an ongoing excitement and reason to stay engaged with the property month-after-month. Perhaps not impressive by today’s standards, MNOG was an incredible technological feat for its time given the constraints of the Internet (back when internet was both capitalized and slow). And the soundscape was superb.

But as good as all of the accoutrements were, BIONICLE would not have been successful if the actual LEGO sets were not compelling. Aimed at an older demographic than most LEGO sets of the time (another reason the first-year sets were labelled as TECHNIC), BIONICLE was a big hit with their younger siblings. This was perhaps a bit of an issue, as the younger crowd had difficulty putting together the ball-and-socket pieces, which required both considerable force and dexterity, but this quite possibly expanded the popularity as mom and dad and older siblings were roped into putting those pieces together.

The unique packaging for the Toa was a big draw and also meant that they could be tossed into large wire bins in almost any store without fear of damage, unlike the thin cardboard boxes of most LEGO sets. This idea would reach its pinnacle the next year with the release of the Bohrok in their pods. Other than the Toa, sets ranged from free with the purchase of a Happy Meal at McDonalds, to expensive for the remote-controlled battery-powered Manas, and covering most price points in between with the other Rahi sets.

There are many other contributing factors to BIONICLE’s initial success, including a ground-breaking social-influencer campaign before social-influencer was a thing, but I don’t think we can overestimate the importance of the collectability factor. Pokémon, with its Gotta Catch ‘Em All! catch-phrase, and the Beanie Babies craze, with an assist from eBay, had set the stage in the years prior and The LEGO Group was trying to capitalize on the trend by producing boxes consisting of a random selection from a collection of seventy-two different masks.

In a happy accident, fourteen masks were initially ”misprints” in non-canonical colors not found in the North American boxes of masks. Much like other mistakes in other products that made it out into the world before or after them, these ”rare” masks helped prime the pump and feed the frenzy of collecting. Whether you were a collector or not, this was just one more facet of BIONICLE that kept the public interest high.

LEGO sets tend to hold their value fairly well over time, even as the price of most individual pieces hold steady at about ten US cents per piece, on average. I have noted a marked increase in the asking prices of the more collectible BIONICLE pieces and sets over the last year or two, perhaps as speculation as we headed into this twentieth anniversary year, or perhaps as the BIONICLE generation gains more expendable income and buys the things they always wanted in their youth.

Even so, holding value or even modest gains over time is not a good investment. As I wrote on Mask of Destiny long ago, if you want to invest, I recommend you look into other, less volatile, more predictable, and more reliable long term investments than children’s toys. And if you want to buy toys, you should play with them. That’s where their true value lies!

As wonderful as BIONICLE is and was, I think it is pretty clear that it never did reach its full potential. Early on, there was talk of a twenty-year story arc. I personally had been hopeful that BIONICLE would get a full major-studio theatrical release block-buster motion picture around this time. Surely there is some up-and-coming director out there who cut their teeth in video animation working with stop-motion BIONICLE figures and loves the property as much as we do. This story of mystical robots on a tropical island will certainly be awakened from its slumber sometime in the future when we desperately need it most.