The Lego Group has officially shut down work on Bionicle: Masks of Power, a fan game that had been in development for a whopping eight years. The team behind Masks of Power confirmed that while it had taken many steps to adhere to Lego’s Fair Play guidelines, it had recently received communication asking it to shut down the project in its entirety, and “remove Masks of Power from the public eye.”
In a post on the Masks of Power website, Team Kanohi thanked fans for their support over the years, and confirmed it will no longer proceed with plans to release a public demo for the game. It has also released a two-hour long demo post-mortem instead, revealing the large scope and quality of the game. While it notes there was still three months worth of polish planned prior to shut down, the game looks fantastic, at a glance.
Team Kanohi began work on Masks of Power as it wanted to create “the type of game we wished we had as kids,” and that goal is clear in the demo video. There’s so much detail packed into the game’s world, and it really does feel like a Lego adaptation straight from the mid-2000s.
Team Kanohi speculated this may actually be why the game was issued a shut down order.
“What we suspect is that our project was too easy to mistake for an official product,” the team said. “At the time of writing, searching ‘Bionicle game’ on Google lists the Steam page for Bionicle: Masks of Power within the first couple of links. An average person seeing our game for the first time could easily think that it was an official game at first glance. And no amount of disclaimers we could put up would be able to change that.”
Bionicle: Masks of Power – Demo Post-Mortem
As Team Kanohi said, it’s likely the depth of the game that inspired Lego to take action. While it’s typically okay with fan games – Kanohi pointed out the company has previously endorsed some via the Bits N’ Bricks podcast – Bionicle: Masks of Power seemingly became too big to ignore.
For its part, Kanohi is taking this shut down in its stride. While it had planned to continue work on Masks of Power in future, it will now abandon the project as requested, and turn focus to wielding lessons learned, to create a brand new, original game.
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“We’ve spent years building an incredibly passionate and talented team of developers. We’ve put untold amounts of time, effort, and love into creating this game, and we’re not about to let it all go to waste,” the team said.
“Our plan is to take everything we’ve learned through creating Masks of Power and use that knowledge and experience as the foundation of a brand-new, original game. Currently codenamed Project Rustbound, our team has already begun brainstorming concepts for a new, original world that we get the chance to build ourselves.”
As part of this shift, the team has also renamed itself “Unmasked Games.” We’re likely to hear more about what this studio is developing sometime in the coming years.
