Hiiiiiiiiii this topic will be for any Lego Island thoughts I decide to share. This game is genuinely fantastic, and while I of course understand that it’s not for everyone, I do unironically believe this game has more than just nostalgia value and crusty charm (though that is indeed part of the reasoning for its good standing in certain corners of the public eye)
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First I might as well just dump all the (finished) random Lego Island art I’ve made thusfar. Most of these are shitposts and/or made in JS Paint lol
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I played Lego Island when I was a kid on the family computer. I know I really liked it, but my memory of it is this vague, colorful smear. I remember being very compelled by the ability to explore an open 3D space on my computer. I also remember ENDLESS stuff about an info desk. Like they just kept talking about the info desk and sending you to the info desk to think about and interact with the info desk? And there was a totally radical 90’s skater guy and I think you could skateboard too?
I was totally a Lego kid. At the time I believe I was still subscribed to LEGO Magazine… I used to check the mail every day hoping it would arrive. Lego had all these half-baked little original worlds and characters they were theming their sets on at the time, which really appealed. Much more fun than their current strategy of just licensing every popular IP. The magazine had comics about them. But the real highlight was the couple of pages of totally insane original lego creations sent in by readers. HUGE, incredibly complex and imaginative sculptures.
I’ve noticed a younger crowd is really into this game right now. Is it that vaporwavey 90’s computer utopian aesthetic, or something else?
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ah it’s great. great game. love the building and racing. i kinda wanna play it on a real computer too
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1 - The “info desk” is the Information Center, the game’s starting area! It’s inhabited by the Infomaniac. And yeah, the amount of things you can click on the Information Center alone is wild
2- The skater kid is Pepper Roni! He’s one of many playable characters and the true/main protagonist of the game! (Fun fact, he’s voiced by the same kid who voiced Andy in Toy Story)
3- Yep, you can skateboard no matter which character you play as
4 - The vaporwavey stuff (plus I just really like rudimentary/early 3D and also old PC games so this game is the perfect marriage of both) is certainly what got me into the game initially (I found about it through MattKC’s videos on its code and so forth) but I’ve stayed with it (and become obsessed) for a lot more than that. This is a great oversimplification of all the things I love about it, but it has a fantastic soundtrack, goofy characters, weird meta implications, lots of unabashed surrealism, charmingly clunky gameplay, and some absolutely bonkers lore
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YEAHHH the racing is admittedly quite difficult for me (I am. Not actually very good at playing games) but it’s also incredibly fun in my humble opinion
The wacky stuff you see during the car race (such as the giant version of Captain Click’s skeleton on the race track) and boat race (sharks come out of just about everything in this game I swear) make it fun just to experience no matter if you do well or terribly. Also in the boat race (on my physical CD-Rom of it at least) characters like to just glitch rapidly for no reason, which is also quite entertaining to watch.
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You can play it in your browser now
Hopefully this will get ported to more platforms eventually.
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OH also you can click TONS of stuff. You click for more endless-seeming dialogue (genuinely this game has slightly over 2 hours worth of just character voice lines), you click to change things in different ways depending on what character you’re playing as (for example, you could change a pine tree to a palm tree as one character, then return as another and change that palm tree from green to yellow.), you click to find secrets, you click to learn control scheme tricks, there is SO much you can click in this game and I love it. I’m a big fan of point-and-click games like Sam & Max and Pajama Sam though so I am definitely biased lol
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YEAHHHH I’ve reblogged that project on Tumblr a few times, it’s awesome!
As far as poiting the game to other things goes, the journey on that front has just begun! This is a good briefing on its current state: https://youtu.be/JUNdWnI5BTk?si=tyT-HWkL7BkiYWYJ
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I am always talking about how much I miss that old CD ROM new media energy… PC Gamer Coconut Monkey Demo Disk core.
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YEAH I fully agree! I wasn’t around for the cd-rom heyday myself but I’ve done a lot research (thanks, internet archive) on many CD-Rom games and experiences from the 90s and 2000s, and I adore the sort of stitched-together almost “scrappy” feeling a lot of them have. (The Museum of Anything Goes and Chop Suey are the best examples I can think of for what I mean)
A lot employ multimedia styles/sensibilities and I find that very fun
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OH YEAH ALSO. For context. The guy in the green suit and the hair ribbon is named John Alist. My friends and I were rewatching Pepper Roni’s character intro FMV when we noticed that what we thought was just Pepper Roni in a different outfit actually had some differences that made it seem as though he was a different character. He had a slightly different hair texture, green eyes instead of blue, a striking absence of freckles, and the same suit/vest-thingy texture as the Infomaniac (but green, rather than red). That, coupled with him appearing for just this one FMV alongside the voiced but ultimately appearanceless interviewer/narrator, and having a short voice clip of him whispering which sounded quite different from Pepper’s voice, led my friends and I to decide that he was meant to be a separate character, he was just a semi-recolor Franksteined from parts of other characters. Thus we gave him the name John Alist (all the names in the game are puns, it’s great) and a design that differentiates him more from Pepper
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some hastily scribbled comparisons (excuse my bad handwriting) from when the john saga was going down
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also i was wrong about that one hair strand circled in green looking the same in both btw. on john the strand is thicker and has no visible separation from what we assume the rest of his bangs to look like, meanwhile on pepper the strand is quite thin and very visibly a separate strand from the two beside it.
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Random Lego Island lore snippets I think about a lot (in no particular order) because I enjoy sparking emotional whiplash and confusion
Infomaniac (and Brickster, briefly, in one line) is the only one who directly acknowledges the player, rather than the character they play as. This is because Infomaniac is the god of the Lego Island universe. (This isn’t even subtext it is just Blatantly There in the manual and semi-canon backstory doc and whatnot)
Lego Island is a confusingly changing number of zillion years old (sometimes it’s 1 zillion, sometimes it’s 40 zillion, who even knows at this point)
Nancy Nubbins finds the Brickster to be, as she calls him, “cute”
Pepper Roni pretty likely has some form of dyslexia
The Brickster knows what electric chairs are (worrying)
Brickster’s hand was bitten off by Infomaniac’s dog and he replaced it with a purposely mismatched hand out of spite, hence why it’s blue.
infomaniac has a fundamental disconnection from any sort of understanding about what it means to be mortal and is the world’s best grudge-holder (he’s also not gonna be getting any “#1 Dad” mugs anytime soon)
Pepper Roni’s father (Bologna Roni) is said to be missing in the manual and is heavily implied to be dissassembled on an island somewhere (aka dead) in the backstory doc. That’s why he lives with Mama and Papa Brickolini, it’s cause they adopted him
There is a character named Red Greenbase (he is my friend group’s Lego Island equivalent of Glup Shitto) and he is perfect
Insurance rates are apparently quite high on the island, according to Dr. Clickitt
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I never played the original but loved Lego Island 2. Used to feel the island was so fun to just explore even though it was tiny. There’s something about the openness of such a closed space that was compelling.
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the computers i played the game on barely ran it and i recall there not really being anything going on anyway but the manual was pretty good. there was a nice bit near the end about how you’re never too old or too young to start a practice
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If you were on a computer that ran it too well it would run so fast that any movement would teleport you to the nearest wall.
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never played this game despite being the target audience but I love this energy
my favorite cd ROM was the magic eye one
and if you like weird haphazard cdrom energy may I suggest the laseractive “game” Goku:
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