Prerelease Sources

There are nine screenshots and one video of development builds of Lego Bionicle GBA, and I plan on analyzing them all. But, before I get too deep into things, I should probably establish where and when they all came from.

The video, mov_tales.avi, is included on the Power Pack CD, and was last modified on March 7, 2001, like most everything else on the disc.

 

 mov_tales.avi.

The first batch of screenshots we have were posted by IGN Pocket on Monday, March 26, 2001, following Nintendo's Camp Game Boy Advance press event, which happened over the weekend. Thankfully, the images are still hosted on IGN's servers. (They're numbered 1.jpg through 8.jpg, if you want to look for yourself.)

The eight screenshots from IGN Pocket.

The next set of screenshots was posted by NintendoWorldReport some time later. Since the five images they posted are captioned Electronic Entertainment Expo 2001, it's likely that they were given these screenshots at that conference, which took place from May 17-19, 2001. Four of the five screenshots are functionally identical to those posted by IGN; the only differences are the jpeg artifacts and the IGN watermark.

The five screenshots from NintendoWorldReport.

There are other versions of these images, presumably because the press kits with these images were distributed to gaming sites. The IGN and NWR sets are just the only ones that mention a specific date. An extreme example of this is the European gaming site GameReactor. It's unclear, but it seems like they posted their versions in 2003, in the mistaken belief that they were screenshots from Bionicle: The Game (GBA). They have the same five screenshots as NWR, but they are resized to be 500px wide. This is kind of a double-edged sword; they're blurrier, but the jpeg artifacts are less of an issue. These versions of the screenshots are the ones in the BS01 "Quest for the Toa" gallery. (BS01 also has a pixel-perfect version of the Le-Koro screenshot, which I haven't been able to source.)

The five screenshots from GameReactor, for completeness' sake.

To put these dates in perspective, NWR reported on July 18, 2001 that the game had been finished "for a while," and was waiting on Nintendo's approval. That means that the Power Pack demo footage and the IGN screenshots were distributed around 3-4 months before the game was finished.

Anyway, that's a lot of text to say very little. Next time, I'll start actually analyzing the differences between the demo footage and the final game, which should hopefully be more exciting!

Tl;dr: the Power Pack demo video is from before March 7, 2001. At least 8 of the 9 screenshots are from before March 24, 2001. For reference, the game was supposedly finished "a while" before July 18, 2001.

Edit (as of June 2, 2020): Since this post, I've found more prerelease sources!