After a massive eight years in development, fan development group Team Kanohi has been asked to cease development on their open-world action RPG Bionicle fan game, BIONICLE: Masks of Power.
Surprising no-one, the request came in a formal notice from The LEGO group – with the demand that the “team shut down the project in its entirety, and remove Bionicle: Masks of Power from the public eye.”
As a sort of headstone for their perished efforts, Team Kanohi updated the projects website with a huge post-mortem statement on this sad ending, but also a celebration of what they had achieved with a full walkthrough of the impressive Unreal Engine 5 demo they had been preparing for release:
For the past eight years, Team Kanohi has been at work creating the Bionicle video game of our dreams. That project has taken many shapes during that time, from Masks of Power: Legacy, to Trials of the Great Spirit, and ultimately, to BIONICLE: Masks of Power as you see it today.
We’ve been transparent about the hardships our team has faced over the past year as we’ve worked to release the first look at BIONICLE: Masks of Power: the FREE THE BAND demo. After many years of hard work, our team was in the final stages of bugfixing and polishing for the demo’s release. We had planned to shadowdrop the demo on August 10th, 2025.
Unfortunately, it seems that will no longer happen. 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.
Although we’re unable to release the demo, we wanted to share a complete video walkthrough of the entire demo in its current state. Please keep in mind that the demo still had 3 months of polish to undergo before launch, meaning that the footage contains many known issues. However, we are still incredibly proud of what our team has accomplished, and wanted to take this last chance to share it with all of you.
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While there isn’t a granular dissection of specifically why the project had to be burned (I mean, Bionicle is a distant memory for the LEGO group nowadays) there is a point of speculation, and it’s what most would expected.
The game just looked too damn good.
BIONICLE: Masks of Power has been in development for over eight years. During that entire time, we’ve made an effort to ensure our project was in good standing with the LEGO Group, carefully following the LEGO Group’s Fair Play guidelines. We have never charged our fans a single cent for the game’s development, and have put disclaimers that clearly label our project as fan-made on our website, Steam page, and every trailer for the game. The LEGO Group has even publicly endorsed similar fan-made games, such as Bionicle: Quest for Mata Nui on their official Bits N’ Bricks Podcast.
Unfortunately, it seems like the LEGO Group’s stance on fan-created media has changed. 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.
The good news is that this isn’t the end of Team Kanohi’s efforts – the monumental work that birthed the fan game is more than proof that they have some sauce on their end, so the team will pivot to doing something wholly original. Currently codenamed Project Rustbound, the team is exploring concepts for what they can achieve outside of the plastic bricks – with a development team rebrand also underway, to emerge as Unmasked Games.
It is endlessly heartbreaking to see amazing fan projects end up on the scrapheap, and realistically it is far too common these days with the concerted efforts to avoid IP infringement.
So for the Bionicle fans out there, it is a bummer. But for fans of Team Kanohi (now Unmasked Games, remember) there is a great deal of hope in seeing something else in the future.
Were you following the development of BIONICLE: Masks of Power? Are you surprised to hear about it’s fate? Let us know in the comments or on social media.
Known throughout the interwebs simply as M0D3Rn, Ash is bad at video games. An old guard gamer who suffers from being generally opinionated, it comes as no surprise that he is both brutally loyal and yet, fiercely whimsical about all things electronic. On occasion will make a youtube video that actually gets views. Follow him on YouTube @Bad at Video Games
