Show HN: Lego Island Playable in the Browser
18 comments
·June 22, 2025Titan2189
Here the Video telling the story behind the port
Sarkie
God I love MattKC and his randomness
lpa22
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
ycombinatrix
Incredible! Was this based off MattKC's decompilation?
Klaster_1
Yes, MattKC mentioned this is his last LI video.
ranger_danger
How is this legal? Specifically, distributing copyrighted assets and using their name/logo without permission.
ktkaufman
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.
debugnik
> 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.
rincebrain
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.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t
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.
Krutonium
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.
eskathos
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?
WA
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.
voidUpdate
Probably because they are "lego bricks", not "legos", in the same way that you don't call a bag of rice "rices"
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.