I love how much of this stuff I get to blame on Dwayne. Not in a bad way. He just gets so excited. And that excitement blasted through my laptop early this morning when I pulled up the work board and saw “WE CAN PLAY LEGO ISLAND??? MAMA PAPA BRICKOLINI?!?!” And then he sent that video, and I gotta say, Yikes. Big yikes. In 1997, I was handing out fades in Mario Kart 64 and Madden 64. But apparently, LEGO Island was a pretty big deal. So, a big thanks to ResetEra user doops. for dropping this. Because now I get to find out what the big deal was all about.
THE WORK THAT WENT INTO BRINGING ‘lego island’ to modern machines is amazing
LEGO Island was an open-world adventure game for the PC that let you build vehicles and explore the island however you wanted. I can’t believe that I had never heard of this at the time. Seven-year-old me would have gone crazy playing this game. But hey, Nintendo had (and still has) your boy in a chokehold.
MattKC Bytes goes on in this video to talk about the process of decompiling the original game to make it run on “everything from modern windows, to Linux, macOS, iOS and completely inside an everyday web browser”. If only I didn’t leave that computer science major behind after two years so that I could graduate with an English degree. I can keep up with some of it, but it still is really interesting to hear him break it down even without a full understanding of the breadth of work that went into it.
I’m actually pretty sure that I’m going to put some real time into playing this. If for no other reason than to know exactly what Dwayne is talking about. But I also always want to reach back to some of the things I missed as a kid because I was so locked in on console life. If you want to know more about the process of bringing LEGO Island to just about everything, there are more videos on MattKC’s main page on YouTube. It’s pretty awesome stuff.
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