LEGO Island can now be played anytime, anywhere

Imagine a world in which you can play classic ‘90s video game LEGO Island anytime, anywhere. Congratulations: you’re living in it.

Anyone who grew up in a time when LEGO video games were in their infancy will have fond memories of wandering around LEGO Island, following the Infomaniac’s tips, firing pizzas at the Brickster and generally revelling in all three of its pixels. But like all the best things in our childhoods, LEGO Island was unfortunately consigned to the corners of our memories, tucked away in a folder labelled ‘nostalgia’ and never to be played again.

Or at least that was its fate… until now. YouTuber MattKC began the arduous process of decompiling the entire game in June 2023, and two years later has managed to get it up and running in web browsers. That means anyone, anywhere can play anytime, without needing to grapple with booting the game natively on Windows 11 (which is apparently not as stress-free as it sounds).

Go on: head to isle.pizza and try it for yourself. Whether you’re reading this on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone, all you need to do is pop over to that link in your browser. So you can play LEGO Island at your desk, on your sofa, on the bus, in the park, aboard the International Space Station (probably) – you name it, LEGO Island is there with you, an old friend by your side one more time.

Or at least for the half hour or so it apparently takes to complete everything there is to do in LEGO Island. This game first debuted back in 1997, and was only the second LEGO video game after LEGO Fun to Build, a Sega Pico title available exclusively in Japan. So… it was basically the first LEGO video game. And there wasn’t a tremendous amount of content there – or at least not for an adult gamer.

But we weren’t adults back in ‘97. (That’s the royal ‘we’.) And you, like us, may have spent hours wandering around this colourful land, hopping on skateboards, delivering pizzas and gliding effortlessly through the conga lines of minifigures that populated the island. So now you can relive that magic – or perhaps enjoy it for the very first time, if you missed this gem back in the ‘90s – directly in your browser.

Click here to play LEGO Island, and don’t forget to check out MattKC’s YouTube channel to learn more about the process of decompiling the game and porting it pretty much everywhere.

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