After nearly a decade in the works, the fan game Bionicle: Masks of Power has been shut down following a request from Lego.
To mark the end of the project, Team Kanohi, a group of fans who came together to build the “Bionicle game of [their] dreams,” has released a “post-mortem” walkthrough of Masks of Power’s last build. It was shaping up to be a stylish third-person action-adventure game featuring Lego’s iconic masked ninjas, and it honestly looks awesome. Check the gameplay video out in the embed below.
In a letter to fans, Team Kanohi stated that it is unclear why, exactly, Lego decided to shut the game down now. As the team wrote, it had worked hard to follow Lego’s terms around fair use of Bionicle assets. For instance, Team Kanohi never planned on charging players for the game, and it clearly labeled all of its websites and game pages with information about Masks of Power being a fan-made project.
Although Lego has not provided any justification, the developer suggests that it might be because Masks of Power has acquired a high profile that is increasingly competing with official Lego products. “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,” Team Kanohi wrote. The letter continues: “An average person seeing our game for the first time could easily think that it was an official game at first glance.”
The shutdown of Masks of Power does not mean that Team Kanohi is disbanding, however. In fact, in the letter to fans, the team announced that it is rebranding as Unmasked Games and is embarking on development of an original project. Currently referred to as Project Rustbound, this original title will build on the knowledge and skills that the team had accrued via its work on Masks of Power. It’ll likely be a while before we hear anything more about Project Rustbound, but if the Masks of Power gameplay is any indication, this team might have the potential to make a pretty cool game.
