Bionicle: The Game

At the turn of the millennium, the Danish brand LEGO took a gamble on something completely new: the dark mythology of the Toa warriors, masks of power and the island of Mata Nui. The Bionicle line became a huge media franchise, so a video game adaptation could hardly be missing. Bionicle: The Game brought this world of heroes and elements to the handheld Game Boy Advance as well.

The game is a mostly action-driven affair in which you take on the roles of the individual Toa and make your way through levels inspired by the brand's story. Each hero is tied to a particular element, fire, water, ice, stone, air or earth, and the environments and the way you move through them differ accordingly. The GBA version uses a two-dimensional perspective and puts the emphasis on combat, overcoming obstacles and pushing forward through varied locations.

The game was published by Electronic Arts and came out in 2003, at a time when Bionicle was at the peak of its popularity and the sets were selling in enormous numbers. The adaptation was meant to bring players closer to a story that until then had been told mainly through comics, animated films and set packaging. At the same time, the GBA version had to squeeze an ambitious world into the constraints of the handheld's eight-bit to sixteen-bit era.

Bionicle's cultural significance is considerable: it was one of the projects that commercially saved LEGO in the early 2000s and showed that the brick brand could build its own original fictional world with deep mythology. For many players born in the nineties, the Toa masks and the duel with Makuta are still a powerful nostalgic memory.

The video game version is therefore above all a ticket into this world for fans who wanted to live out their heroes' stories actively rather than just watch them. Even though it belongs among the licensed titles of its time, on the portable console it filled the role of a pocket adventure tied to a beloved toy saga.

Why play it: For nostalgic fans of the brick Toa, it is an interactive trip into the mythology of the island of Mata Nui, right in your pocket.