After eight years of development, an ambitious Lego Bionicle fangame has been forced to shut down. Bionicle: Masks of Power was months away from having a playable demo, according to an update by developer Team Kanohi, but it had to be cancelled because Lego stepped in to ruin the fun.
“The Lego Group has asked our team to shut down our project in its entirety, and remove Bionicle: Masks of Power from the public eye,” a statement on the game’s site reads.
The developers say they did everything they could to make sure the project “was in good standing with the Lego Group” by filling every mention of it with disclaimers that it was an unofficial game. Masks of Power was even mentioned on Lego’s official gaming podcast.
“Unfortunately, it seems like the Lego Group’s stance on fan-created media has changed,” Team Kanohi said. “While we can only speculate as to the exact reason why they have asked us to remove the game at this time, what we suspect is that our project was too easy to mistake for an official product.”
Despite there being a number of official Bionicle games, Google searching for “Bionicle game” brings up Masks of Power at the top of the results. “An average person seeing our game for the first time could easily think that it was an official game at first glance,” Team Kanohi said, “And no amount of disclaimers we could put up would be able to change that.”
The demo, which was supposed to be shadow dropped in August, won’t see the light of day. However, Team Kanohi has released a full walkthrough video of what it would’ve included on YouTube. The footage is even more impressive than what was shown in 2023. Its intricately detailed jungle environments and weighty, almost soulslike combat are extremely impressive for a fangame made with Unreal Engine. It’s a huge step up from the janky Bionicle flash games I used to play as a kid. Lego would’ve been better off hiring them, if you ask me.
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It won’t all be for a waste though. At the close of the statement, the team announced that it will take everything it learned to develop an original game called Project Rustbound. And with it, the studio has been renamed to Unmasked Games.
Unmasked said it won’t have anything to share about the new game for a while, but the metallic logo suggests it probably won’t be very far off from what it put together in Masks of Power.
“This has been heartbreaking news for our entire team,” it wrote, “but we’re also incredibly excited about what the future has in store, and for what we’ll get the chance to create next.”
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