Earlier this year, the Lego Island fans painstakingly decompiling the game's original source code by hand completed their years-long work. Now, just a few months later, that effort has culminated in a version of the 1997 classic which you can play in just about any web browser on just about any device.
Yes, you can head to Isle.pizza on your web browser of choice - it even works on mobile - to enjoy the full Lego Island experience. There's a launcher resembling the original game's, a config menu letting you set basic options, and a full recreation of the original game that functions almost exactly as it did in 1997. The devs warn that you "may encounter bugs" as the project is still technically in development, but the few minutes I spent playing were pretty much identical to my childhood memories of running the game on a Windows 95 PC.
Lego Island is technically playable on modern Windows PCs, but only with a whole host of mods and granular fixes that it's fair to say most players seeking a quick nostalgia bite won't have the patience to install. The only real issue with this browser port is that you can't save your progress, but it's pretty easy to see all Lego Island has to offer in a single session anyway.
The video above from MattKC, who's become something close to the face of the whole Lego Island decompilation project, offers a whole lot more in the way of technical details on how this port came together. Key to the whole story is hacker Anders Jenbo, who previously contributed to the Diablo project DevilutionX.
Work was already underway to get the newly-decompiled Lego Island ported to new platforms when Jenbo joined the project, but his work vastly accelerated those efforts. "Major milestones started being hit on a near-daily basis. Before we knew it, Anders had triangles showing on the screen, then meshes rendering, then textures, and then lighting," MattKC explains.
"Within two weeks, we went from seeing practically nothing to seeing the whole island rendered with completely custom code," he continues. "Seeing all of this come together so quickly was insane. We had all predicted several months or even years worth of further work to be done even after the decomp was complete, but no. It's like we all blinked and the hardest, most daunting part of the process was already done."
That work helped free Lego Island from its dependencies on old Windows versions, leading to this browser port - which is apparently "only the beginning" of what's possible. PSP and 3DS ports are already in the works, and there's now every possibility that Lego Island could reach near Doom levels of porting to archaic hardware.
"The core decompilation team really believes this game is something special, but the only reason we do is because we actually got to play it when it worked," MattKC says. "It’s a real shame how much of a technical disaster it’s become on modern computers, because it deserves to be preserved and playable for years to come."
Now, at least, it seems that Lego Island will live on for the foreseeable future.
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