An open-world, third-person Bionicle fan game that had a lot of hype in the community and which has been in development for nearly a decade has allegedly been canceled by the Lego Group just a few months before the project’s first big demo was set to release.
Bionicle was a popular line of buildable action figures created by the Lego group in 2001. The line was the first original transmedia franchise created by Lego, featuring a deep amount of lore and stories told in comics, books, and animated movies. It was planned to run for 20 years but, due to low sales, was ended in 2010. It was revived in 2015, but old fans didn’t embrace the reboot and the revival ended in 2016. Despite a decade having passed since Lego made new Bionicle sets, fans still love the weird franchise featuring bio-organic super robots and sci-fi magic. And for the past eight years, a growing group of fans known as Team Kanohi have been developing their dream Bionicle game, Masks of Power, but have been forced to stop after Lego demanded it.
On May 17, Team Kanohi announced that the Lego Group requested that the team shut down the project completely and remove Masks of Power from the internet.
“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,” said Team Kanohi. “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.”
Despite not being able to release the demo or finish the game, Team Kanohi has put out a two-hour video showing off the unfinished demo for the Bionicle game. The group says it’s still “incredibly proud” of what it has made and I have to agree. This looks awesome, and I’m not even a Bionicle fan.
So why did the Lego Group shut down this project? According to the dev team, they have been in contact with the company for years and have followed all of the rules surrounding fan-created content. Masks of Power was going to be released for free, and included disclaimers that made it clear this was a fan project. Lego has also officially called out and supported other Bionicle fan games in the past. However, it seems like Masks of Power was starting to look too official for Lego lawyers.
“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,” said the devs. “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.”
It’s not all sad news, though, as the team behind the now-cancelled fan game has announced plans to develop a new game—Project Rustbound—built off the work they put into Masks of Power. Hopefully this project gets to see the light of day.
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