I remember watching my young nephew play Lego Island and the introductory video where the camera flies around the island is amazing. But then he was totally baffled by the 'main menu' when some excited lego guy babbles instructions at you in flowery hard-to-follow language, and you had to do abtract things like write in a book or drag icons onto the map before you got to do anything fun like racing cars. I think he could have clicked around that screen for hours and never realised he had to drag the people onto the map.
Great game but they wouldn't make it like that now. Its like a grown ups idea of an interface that a young child would like, rather than something actually tested.
Yes but that only works if the child is listening. Children dont listen to wiggly mad dudes waving around on the screen. They just randomly click around and giggle at things.
They'd do well to play more games like this then! All of the Humongous Entertainment games in particular have a special place in my heart. There's nothing much intuitive about these 90's/00's point-and-click games, but that's mostly the point; to let kids click around and see what works in an entertaining fashion.
Nothing to do with "smart", or at least that's mostly irrelevant to this observation. But it's definitely age-dependent. No matter how "smart", it's not fair to expect young children to immediately and fully pay attention to some "random" voice when other interesting things are going on at the same time.
I'm notoriously bad at figuring out video games but was able to grok this at the age of 7. It probably had more to do with the fact that education in the 90s placed a decent emphasis on computer literacy (e.g. "Mouse Practice" for Mac Classic) so I was hip to the drag-and-drop paradigm. I don't have kids but I've read that most grow up on touch interfaces these days due to the ubiquity of tablets so I'd imagine that the mouse context is foreign to them.
Part of the game is discovery and clicking and moving things around is a core gameplay mechanic. That being said, 1996 game UX was a little rough around the edges, as you said.
I think kids are smarter than you give them credit for. You’re right that they randomly click around and will do so for hours. But they /will/ do so for hours. And when it finally clicks - that time was not entirely wasted. Kids in my observation essentially brute force everything. Their one resource is time and they will happily use it for as long as they feel.
You have to click the red arrows a couple times then go through the rotating door.
I don't remember struggling with it much as a kid tbh.
I've thought about what I used to do with computers before and realized I used to have way more patience with them than I do now. I remember suffering a lot of the stupidity in qbasic and Turbo Pascal when I was 11. I don't think I would tolerate that today. Lego island seems similar.
Holy cow that's incredible. I remember playing this when I was ~6 on Windows 95 and being able to walk around and everything was so cool. Now it runs in the browser.
The decomp approach seems surprisingly effective. I know someone else did this with starcraft to get it to run on ARM and said it was the wrong way to do it although I think he did it all in assembly instead of trying to get something sane out of it.
Oh man, this is great timing – I played the hell out of this game in middle school, and I've recently been investigating either getting it running on modern hardware. I got it installed & launching inside an XP VM, but that is (unsurprisingly) not ideal.
I've been thinking about building a retro gaming PC for these kinds of games, and now I can kick that can a little further down the road.
I haven't been in the time this game was popular, but I cannot deny that making it playable in a web browser is crazy. And to all the people that did play and enjoy it back then, I think they'll have a happy surprise.
I doubt there will be a letter... there's been an enthusiast-driven project to remake Lego Rock Raiders (Manic Miners if you're interested) for years now, and not only is Lego aware, they've actually provided some of the original assets for the game (the intro movie and some misc. graphics) to help the project along. As long as no one is monetizing it they don't seem to much care.
Which like... is the balanced view IMO? Like nobody is making money off this or the Manic Miners project, it's not detracting from any games Lego is actually releasing right now, and absent those factors, it's essentially free advertising and building community goodwill. I wish more companies would take this "it's not hurting us, just let it be" route for fan projects instead of guarding their IP like a dragon.
TL;DR: it's in a gray area, but nobody with power actually cares (at least for now), so it's effectively fine.
As I understand it, Lego is aware of the project (there's been a significant increase in interest in Lego Island in the past few years, with attempts to obtain the original source code) and simply does not care. It's an ancient IP and can't realistically compete with anything new, at least not in a way that would significantly affect Lego's revenue. This is not unlike the way several other companies have acted when their respective older games have been given the same treatment; if a fan project is not actively causing problems (reputational, financial, etc.), most companies will just leave it alone. For companies that actually seem to care about public opinion (as opposed to, say, Nintendo), I think it's fair to assume that the bad optics of taking legal action against a random fan project, however legally justified it might be, far outweigh any possible benefits.
> the bad optics of taking legal action against a random fan project
Just last month LEGO shut down Masks of Power, the Bionicle fan game. They were really close to a release and LEGO had allegedly met the team and given them permission in the past.
I'm increasingly convinced that fan projects should be developed quietly and announced right on release, so they at least exist somewhere on the internet if they get shut down immediately after.
I don't see where you've read that they accepted donations. Every article and Reddit post I find says they didn't? It was indeed releasing on Steam for free, but I don't know if they had contacted LEGO before doing so.
Also, this wasn't the only Bionicle game that LEGO had endorsed, Quest for Mata Nui too, which makes this even more of a heel-turn. They won't have to shut down that one, though: the team went silent and then the main dev passed away.
I did, actually, because on my phone it's in a burger menu hidden below the Internet Archive banner; thanks for pointing that out.
I see the project itself didn't accept donations but they pointed visitors at each dev's personal donation page, with no guarantee that it would go towards the project. I can see legal thinking that's bullshit, although I'd be surprised if most of those hadn't already been setup by the time LEGO originally gave them the ok.
Specifically, I would assume the calculus is about "how much damage does this do by existing" versus "how much risk is there that we attempt to shut it down and sue and set a precedent by losing", and because for most projects the first value is tiny and the second value is potentially enormous, companies leave them alone.
When either value changes drastically in scale (e.g. a project does something making it very cut and dry which side of legal precedent it falls on, or to massively increase the damage to The Brand(tm)), that's when you get worried.
Nintendo and Lego are on the same level when it comes to sue people for trademark violations. There are several cease-and-desist orders against YouTubers for calling no-name bricks legos.
This is how I feel when I hear or see people use the word “maths”, but I simply accept the cultural differences in language.
Though I don’t think throwing an “s” on a word to make it plural, even if technically incorrect, is on the same level as “basgetti”. Adding an “s” to words to make them plural, is generally a good rule, there are just some exceptions, and not that many people are deep enough into Lego to know it’s one of those exceptions.
From my experience they also have quality as a moat. No budget manufacturers seems to be getting the tolerances Lego is getting. There could be producers that are getting there though, but I don't know them.
Note that companies usually ignore fan projects like this and don't mention them at all. If they would mention and tolerate them, it weakens their intellectual property in a future lawsuit.
Once fan projects get too much traction, companies have to cease and desist them because that's the way intellectual properties work in the law. It usually has nothing to do with whether it was a cool project or not, it's just that there's way too much money at stake when not defending your IP.
Amusingly I actually have Video of Atari's Lead of Marketing playing OpenRCT2 on Stream, giving away RCT2 Keys to promote RCT World. To this day, Atari has left us alone though, so yeah it's pretty much not worth it to them to try anything.
If I recall correctly, somebody found out that the original creator of the game, Chris Sawyer, despises the OpenRCT2 project -- but he can't do anything about it, because the rights belong to Atari.
The last update video I watched from MattKC indicated they were still deciding how to approach this. Based on the commit dates in that tree, it looks like they must have completed it.
I actually received the source flash for this game from Lego when they discontinued it online.
I was able to run the flash, but there also seems to be some scripts or other functionality that allows the internationalization of the text bubbles. I could never get this working. The text bubbles were just empty.
Do you know how to overcome this? Or is your comment indicating that this game is online somewhere?
It has trouble with regaining focus at times. Try switching back and forth between the game and another tab/window and it will recover eventually (the hanging is just the game being paused when it goes out of focus)
I remember watching my young nephew play Lego Island and the introductory video where the camera flies around the island is amazing. But then he was totally baffled by the 'main menu' when some excited lego guy babbles instructions at you in flowery hard-to-follow language, and you had to do abtract things like write in a book or drag icons onto the map before you got to do anything fun like racing cars. I think he could have clicked around that screen for hours and never realised he had to drag the people onto the map.
Great game but they wouldn't make it like that now. Its like a grown ups idea of an interface that a young child would like, rather than something actually tested.
To be fair, after you enter your name in the book, the Infomaniac tells you that you have to drag a portrait on to the map to begin the game.
Yes but that only works if the child is listening. Children dont listen to wiggly mad dudes waving around on the screen. They just randomly click around and giggle at things.
They'd do well to play more games like this then! All of the Humongous Entertainment games in particular have a special place in my heart. There's nothing much intuitive about these 90's/00's point-and-click games, but that's mostly the point; to let kids click around and see what works in an entertaining fashion.
Gross generalization. Some are smarter than that.
Nothing to do with "smart", or at least that's mostly irrelevant to this observation. But it's definitely age-dependent. No matter how "smart", it's not fair to expect young children to immediately and fully pay attention to some "random" voice when other interesting things are going on at the same time.
I'm notoriously bad at figuring out video games but was able to grok this at the age of 7. It probably had more to do with the fact that education in the 90s placed a decent emphasis on computer literacy (e.g. "Mouse Practice" for Mac Classic) so I was hip to the drag-and-drop paradigm. I don't have kids but I've read that most grow up on touch interfaces these days due to the ubiquity of tablets so I'd imagine that the mouse context is foreign to them.
Is the child like 3? He needs to learn to listen. Valuable life skill.
this was 25 years ago, he's a project manager now
Part of the game is discovery and clicking and moving things around is a core gameplay mechanic. That being said, 1996 game UX was a little rough around the edges, as you said.
Yeah, its just the contrast between the very exciting intro video and the completely baffling main menu was kindof crushing
I think kids are smarter than you give them credit for. You’re right that they randomly click around and will do so for hours. But they /will/ do so for hours. And when it finally clicks - that time was not entirely wasted. Kids in my observation essentially brute force everything. Their one resource is time and they will happily use it for as long as they feel.
I never played this game before and I got stuck with the main menu as well :)
I also struggled and quit after 10 seconds or something not getting onto the island ^^
You have to click the red arrows a couple times then go through the rotating door.
I don't remember struggling with it much as a kid tbh.
I've thought about what I used to do with computers before and realized I used to have way more patience with them than I do now. I remember suffering a lot of the stupidity in qbasic and Turbo Pascal when I was 11. I don't think I would tolerate that today. Lego island seems similar.
Here the Video telling the story behind the port
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUNdWnI5BTk
https://youtu.be/gthm-0Av93Q is also a fascinating dive into the decompilation process here!
Holy cow that's incredible. I remember playing this when I was ~6 on Windows 95 and being able to walk around and everything was so cool. Now it runs in the browser.
The decomp approach seems surprisingly effective. I know someone else did this with starcraft to get it to run on ARM and said it was the wrong way to do it although I think he did it all in assembly instead of trying to get something sane out of it.
God I love MattKC and his randomness
Incredible! Was this based off MattKC's decompilation?
Yes, MattKC mentioned this is his last LI video.
this is one of those games that lives in my head. the quirky narrator and the personalities of all the characters felt really unique at the time.
seeing stuff like this, and backyard baseball, again in browser or modern apps just doesn't hit the same though
Who wants to do LEGO racers next?
Yes yes yes!
put me in coach
Oh man, this is great timing – I played the hell out of this game in middle school, and I've recently been investigating either getting it running on modern hardware. I got it installed & launching inside an XP VM, but that is (unsurprisingly) not ideal.
I've been thinking about building a retro gaming PC for these kinds of games, and now I can kick that can a little further down the road.
I haven't been in the time this game was popular, but I cannot deny that making it playable in a web browser is crazy. And to all the people that did play and enjoy it back then, I think they'll have a happy surprise.
I'd love to be able to play Lego Island 2.
How is this legal? Specifically, distributing copyrighted assets and using their name/logo without permission.
It isn't. It will stay up only until they get sent a strongly worded email/letter by LEGO. Experience it while you can.
I doubt there will be a letter... there's been an enthusiast-driven project to remake Lego Rock Raiders (Manic Miners if you're interested) for years now, and not only is Lego aware, they've actually provided some of the original assets for the game (the intro movie and some misc. graphics) to help the project along. As long as no one is monetizing it they don't seem to much care.
Which like... is the balanced view IMO? Like nobody is making money off this or the Manic Miners project, it's not detracting from any games Lego is actually releasing right now, and absent those factors, it's essentially free advertising and building community goodwill. I wish more companies would take this "it's not hurting us, just let it be" route for fan projects instead of guarding their IP like a dragon.
Lego is primarily a toy company, where Nintendo is a video game company (primarily).
Even though, both companies have a lot of overlap.
Agreed, LEGO aren't like Nintendo.
TL;DR: it's in a gray area, but nobody with power actually cares (at least for now), so it's effectively fine.
As I understand it, Lego is aware of the project (there's been a significant increase in interest in Lego Island in the past few years, with attempts to obtain the original source code) and simply does not care. It's an ancient IP and can't realistically compete with anything new, at least not in a way that would significantly affect Lego's revenue. This is not unlike the way several other companies have acted when their respective older games have been given the same treatment; if a fan project is not actively causing problems (reputational, financial, etc.), most companies will just leave it alone. For companies that actually seem to care about public opinion (as opposed to, say, Nintendo), I think it's fair to assume that the bad optics of taking legal action against a random fan project, however legally justified it might be, far outweigh any possible benefits.
> the bad optics of taking legal action against a random fan project
Just last month LEGO shut down Masks of Power, the Bionicle fan game. They were really close to a release and LEGO had allegedly met the team and given them permission in the past.
I'm increasingly convinced that fan projects should be developed quietly and announced right on release, so they at least exist somewhere on the internet if they get shut down immediately after.
It looks like the team had made a Steam page for their fan game and were accepting donations for working on it, so I can see why Lego felt compelled to take it down. https://web.archive.org/web/20241125104301/https://masksofpo...
I don't see where you've read that they accepted donations. Every article and Reddit post I find says they didn't? It was indeed releasing on Steam for free, but I don't know if they had contacted LEGO before doing so.
Also, this wasn't the only Bionicle game that LEGO had endorsed, Quest for Mata Nui too, which makes this even more of a heel-turn. They won't have to shut down that one, though: the team went silent and then the main dev passed away.
> I don't see where you've read that they accepted donations.
You may have missed the "Buy us a coffee" link at the top of the archived Masks of Power page that I linked.
I did, actually, because on my phone it's in a burger menu hidden below the Internet Archive banner; thanks for pointing that out.
I see the project itself didn't accept donations but they pointed visitors at each dev's personal donation page, with no guarantee that it would go towards the project. I can see legal thinking that's bullshit, although I'd be surprised if most of those hadn't already been setup by the time LEGO originally gave them the ok.
Yeah I don't understand why fan projects aren't already developed anonymously to prevent issues from happening.
Specifically, I would assume the calculus is about "how much damage does this do by existing" versus "how much risk is there that we attempt to shut it down and sue and set a precedent by losing", and because for most projects the first value is tiny and the second value is potentially enormous, companies leave them alone.
When either value changes drastically in scale (e.g. a project does something making it very cut and dry which side of legal precedent it falls on, or to massively increase the damage to The Brand(tm)), that's when you get worried.
Nintendo and Lego are on the same level when it comes to sue people for trademark violations. There are several cease-and-desist orders against YouTubers for calling no-name bricks legos.
I don't know why, but the US invention "legos" is incredibly grating.
Its like a whole country called spaghetti "basgetti" as kids and just went with it.
Don't worry, at least we don't call them legi
This is how I feel when I hear or see people use the word “maths”, but I simply accept the cultural differences in language.
Though I don’t think throwing an “s” on a word to make it plural, even if technically incorrect, is on the same level as “basgetti”. Adding an “s” to words to make them plural, is generally a good rule, there are just some exceptions, and not that many people are deep enough into Lego to know it’s one of those exceptions.
"Lego" is Danish origin.
"leg godt" = "play good"
---
What your word of choice? "Miniature building blocks"?
Not really a US invention, pretty sure countless other languages will transform the word the same way. I know mine does, being an agglutinative one.
consider: bologna
Off-brand toy bricks are a direct threat to LEGO's bottom line, which is in the business of selling toy bricks, and only has its popularity as a moat.
Copies of old LEGO games floating around online are effectively just free LEGO advertising, so the situation may be quite different here.
> only has its popularity as a moat
From my experience they also have quality as a moat. No budget manufacturers seems to be getting the tolerances Lego is getting. There could be producers that are getting there though, but I don't know them.
Probably because they are "lego bricks", not "legos", in the same way that you don't call a bag of rice "rices"
If we are being pedantic, they are called “LEGO”.
> you don't call a bag of rice "rices"
Well I didn't until now
Absolutely nothing should be getting called "legos", dear god, its "lego" or "lego bricks"
Note that companies usually ignore fan projects like this and don't mention them at all. If they would mention and tolerate them, it weakens their intellectual property in a future lawsuit.
Once fan projects get too much traction, companies have to cease and desist them because that's the way intellectual properties work in the law. It usually has nothing to do with whether it was a cool project or not, it's just that there's way too much money at stake when not defending your IP.
Amusingly I actually have Video of Atari's Lead of Marketing playing OpenRCT2 on Stream, giving away RCT2 Keys to promote RCT World. To this day, Atari has left us alone though, so yeah it's pretty much not worth it to them to try anything.
If I recall correctly, somebody found out that the original creator of the game, Chris Sawyer, despises the OpenRCT2 project -- but he can't do anything about it, because the rights belong to Atari.
Is there any way for a company, Lego in this case, to adopt a fan mod or remake, to make it legitimate IP/copyright wise?
Absolutely. They just have to license it, and that license can be for a nominal (think $1) cost.
That said, Lego doesn't own the game, so if it came down to it, they could strip all the references to "Lego" from it and probably be fine.
It's definitely not a "gray" area though it may well be true that no one cares, so it's effectively fine.
It's interesting. Can I add it to my website to showcase it?
This is impressive on so many levels. What an absolute nostaliga trip! Thank you for this.
How is Direct3D retained mode implemented in the browser?
d3drm has been implemented from scratch: https://github.com/isledecomp/isle-portable/tree/master/mini...
The entire project can be compiled targeting Emscripten. There's nothing particular to the browser implementation
The last update video I watched from MattKC indicated they were still deciding how to approach this. Based on the commit dates in that tree, it looks like they must have completed it.
I believe one of the DevolutionX (diablo) developers did this
What about Mata Nui?
Isn't that a Flash game? You can already run that in a browser today.
I actually received the source flash for this game from Lego when they discontinued it online.
I was able to run the flash, but there also seems to be some scripts or other functionality that allows the internationalization of the text bubbles. I could never get this working. The text bubbles were just empty.
Do you know how to overcome this? Or is your comment indicating that this game is online somewhere?
Thanks for info!
It hangs after I try to inspect elements...
It has trouble with regaining focus at times. Try switching back and forth between the game and another tab/window and it will recover eventually (the hanging is just the game being paused when it goes out of focus)
good.