Hey there, BIONICLE fans! I’m James, the creator of Wall of History — an online compilation of entire BIONICLE legend. Now that Wall of History is officially a part of MaskOfDestiny, I’d like to take a look back at how far the site has come, and finally do a bit of my own chronicling — despite launching barely a year and a half ago, Wall of History is the product of years of thought, planning, and work, and today, I’d like to recount our own history, as well as give you a sneak peek of what’s coming next.
In 2012, I started reading a webcomic. A webcomic that blended still images, text, animations, and even games into an extremely complex story. A webcomic that was thousands of pages and hundreds of thousands of words in length. Yes, I’m afraid I must admit it at long last… in 2012, I was a Homestuck kid. While reading Homestuck, I had a thought — I’d just started delving into the BIONICLE story in more depth (having only watched the movies and read a handful of comics beforehand), and thought to myself, Man, this multimedia webcomic format would be perfect for BIONICLE… Someone should really get on that!
Five years passed, and it was now 2017. No one, as far as I could tell, had gotten on that.
Fine, I guess I’ll do it.
On October 1st, 2017, I started the painstaking process of transcribing all the BIONICLE novels to Google Docs, beginning with BIONICLE Chronicles #1: Tale of the Toa. Ten days later, I combined this transcription with the official walk-through of Mata Nui: The Online Game, as well as new scans of the first three BIONICLE comics, to make BIONICLE: Year One, a PDF prototype of Wall of History. At the time, my plan was to create PDF compilations first, share them on /r/bioniclelego, get feedback from the community on structure and presentation, then finally migrate all that content to a website.
Days later, though, my real life caught up with me, and for a variety of reasons, work on this project ground to a halt. It would be early 2019 before I could again focus on this website I was creating, then named “Six Heroes, One Destiny.” (Yeah, I’m not sure what I was thinking either.) Given that multiple PDF compilations had cropped up in my downtime, I had decided to skip that step entirely, and dove straight into web development.
The very first version of this website was created in the now-discontinued Adobe Muse, published on February 23rd, 2019, renamed “Wall of History” at (almost literally) the last second, and featured just the first six chapters of BIONICLE Chronicles #1: Tale of the Toa. I first shared the project on BZPower, then Twitter, in the hopes of getting feedback from potential users. The site quickly garnered quite a bit of attention, and, with an entire community of fans offering their input, it continued to grow.
Over the summer of 2019, all twenty-nine BIONICLE novels would be added to Wall of History, along with animations, comics, short stories, story serials, and more. The continual addition of new content culminated in the Big Update, an update in late July that included animations, all the remaining novels, and several serials. The Big Update also included the first guidebook added to Wall of History, BIONICLE: Metru Nui • City of Legends.
Following the Big Update, I began rebuilding Wall of History from the ground up. It had become clear by that point that Adobe Muse could not support the vision I had for the site, and a full-fledged web application, built with original HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, would be necessary. As 2019 came to a close, the Wall of History you know today began to take shape, and on March 21st, 2020, the Nuva Update went live. This update included a complete overall of Wall of History’s back end, as well as the addition of new content, including the first three BIONICLE movies. It also included a test version of Wall of History’s current guidebook integration.
Wall of History’s most recent updates were our four 810NICLE Day 2020 updates, those being the Story Update, the Reference Update, the Languages Update, and the Games Update. The Story and Reference Updates were the end goals of changes that began in the Nuva Update, and the Languages and Games Updates were the first steps toward expanding the scope of content on Wall of History. 810NICLE Day was also when we announced our merger with MaskOfDestiny, BioMedia Project, and Litestone Studios, which we took the first true step of today, with the reveal of the Wall of History section on MaskOfDestiny.
And now you may be asking, “What are the next steps? What’s next for Wall of History?” Well, today I’ll be giving you some hints!
Currently, I’m focusing most of my energy on database design improvements, which will make Wall of History run better, as well as allow for the seamless addition of new content to the site. The new content you can expect first includes higher-quality comic book scans, BIONICLE novels in Spanish and Japanese, and more guidebook information (I’m also exploring the possibility of integrating Greg Farshtey’s various Q&A discussions into Wall of History, but the feasibility of this is yet to be seen).
Following the aforementioned database improvements, I’ll be adding one of the most requested features that hasn’t been added yet, that being a “read as standalone” option for multi-chapter stories. This feature will allow you to read any comic series, novel, or serial without any other content mixed in with it.
These additions aren’t all I’ve got coming to Wall of History by any means, so be sure to keep an eye on our Twitter for more information. Thanks for reading!
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