Fan-made LEGO BIONICLE game is shut down three months before launch
Team Kanohi has announced that its fan-made LEGO BIONICLE game, Masks of Power, has been reportedly shut down by the LEGO Group.
The team has been working on the game for more than eight years, with a planned demo launch on August 10, 2025. However, Team Kanohi announced in a new post on the website that the game is being shut down in its entirety, reportedly at the request of the LEGO Group.
“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,” Team Kanohi wrote. “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.”
While Team Kanohi doesn’t give a confirmed reason as to why this is, it speculates that ‘our project was too easy to mistake for an official product’, despite ‘carefully following the LEGO Group’s Fair Play guidelines’. In the past, LEGO Games has also publicly acknowledged and endorsed similar projects.
Team Kanohi has released a complete video walkthrough of the entire demo in its current state to show fans what could have been. In addition, the work that went into Masks of Power is now being revamped into a new and original game, running under the codename Project Rustbound for now, as well as changing the studio name to Unmasked Games.
“We’ve spent years building an incredibly passionate and talented team of developers,” the announcement read. “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.”
You can watch the complete walkthrough via the embedded video below.
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Disgusting move from LEGO. Can’t imagine what the devs are feeling right now after 8 years of hard work. Gone are the days where TLG represented creativity. Don’t they see that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from a project like this?
Honestly a ridiculously scummy move by Lego. They pulled the rug right out from under these passionate developers.