Gathered friends!
In the wake of the recent boycott of LEGO over their shameless spit on the Bionicle fandom, driving the final nail into the coffin of the company’s relationship with the fans of the most important franchise in LEGO history, the hashtag “#RestoreTheMasksOfPower” has started gaining popularity.
The goal of this campaign is pretty clear to any dedicated fan, but for those who don’t understand the sudden surge in fan hostility towards LEGO, I thought it would be helpful to put the whole story behind the hashtag in one place so that those unfamiliar with the company’s greatest crime can easily read the details.
About eight years ago, a group of fans known as Team Kanohi began working on a Bionicle fangame titled Bionicle: Masks of Power.
The idea was to create a game that will be exactly what LEGO tried to offer us over two decades ago, in 2001, but ultimately failed: an epic adventure game with platform elements where we’ll be playing as a team of Toa Mata heroes on their mission to collect Kanohi Masks and defeat the Makuta with his Rahi army.
In fairness to LEGO, before any work began, Team Kanohi wrote to LEGO and contacted one of the company’s employees to ask if they had permission to launch such a project. It’s unclear what role the employee played and how much of a blessing he could give the fan group on behalf of the company, but Team Kanohi was informed that as long as they followed the rules written in the company’s policy, they could go ahead with their project.
Thinking they had LEGO’s full blessing, Team Kanohi got to work. Putting their own money and free time into their non-profit project, and going through a lot of hardships in the meantime, they worked hard on their project for years.
Along the way, there were a few changes in plans, such as a change in the game engine, which resulted in the extension of work and the release of Masks of Power: Legacy in 2021, and the idea for the final product was constantly evolving.
Over the years, we were receiving more and more materials: first screenshots, then trailers, finally gameplays. Masks of Power began to look not like a small game from an indie studio, but a full-fledged triple-A title, combining elements of Nier Automata, Dark Souls, The Legend of Zelda, Horizon Zero Dawn and Monster Hunter.
Even the Cryoshell, a band known for their songs used in TV commercials for Bionicle sets, collaborated with Esseger to write a new song, “As Above, So Below,” for one of the trailers.
Hype for the game was huge, and it seemed that we’re going to get the biggest fangame in whole gaming history. In 2023 it appeared even on Steam, which was a brilliant move because the game’s presence on such a platform could not only let this fangame reach more people, but also promote the Bionicle series among younger generation, which would also benefit LEGO itself.
Throughout the creation of their fangame, Team Kanohi carefully took care to adhere to every point of fair use, knowing that LEGO, like any other corporation, could, like Vader in “The Empire Strikes Back”, alter the deal and give the fan studio the middle finger at any moment.
The playable demo of the game was supposed to appear back in 2024, but because of personal problems of Team Kanohi members, demo’s premiere has been moved to 810nicle Day 2025. But no one expected that before the demo will see the light of day, LEGO would deliver the biggest tragedy to the Bionicle fandom in the history of the series and the company itself: someone at LEGO decided to shamelessly spit on the fans and the eight years of Team Kanohi’s hard work, suddenly ordering them through mail to stop working on the game and remove all trailers from the web under the threat of taking legal action against the fan studio if they won’t comply.
With their attack on creativity, the company has made it clear to the world that the values they supposedly promote are a lie, and LEGO is just another cold corporation that sees no problem in killing fan creativity for no reason at all. In doing so, they have taught us a lesson: not to try to be fair to LEGO because the company will not return the favor, and also a lesson not to announce big projects in advance, but to release them first, presenting the company with a fait accompli.
After eight years of hard work on the fangame, the existence of which LEGO was fully aware, the most important fan project in LEGO history, related to an IP that LEGO had been neglecting for a decade, was just sentenced to be thrown in the trash as a result of a random decision of some corpo rats that should be now fired for what they have done.
Interestingly, if we search the web for mentions about similar cases from past years, it turns out that LEGO is not particularly known for killing fan initiatives, and the situation related to the Masks of Power is actually pretty unique. Especially since, as Team Kanohi members claim, the team did not in any way violate the company’s policies, which they have become thoroughly familiar with.
There is also no explanation as to why, instead of ruining fans’ hopes of playing the game, LEGO made no attempt to reach an agreement with Team Kanohi in some other way, such as hiring members of the studio. We’ve had this happen before, for example with the fan remake of Rock Raiders, whose creator was recently hired by LEGO. It seems as if LEGO simply wanted to bury Bionicle, stifle the series’ fandom, and make the world forget about the most important IP in LEGO history. If this were true, it would come as no surprise, as Bionicle fans have been saying for years that they feel unwanted and discriminated against by a company that, despite clear signals that there is a huge interest in the series, rejects every opportunity to properly honor it.
But we have to remember that the Bionicle fandom is one of the largest and strongest LEGO fandoms, second only to LEGO Castle fans, so LEGO’s decision did not, of course, go unnoticed.
Fans who have been pent up with anger and disappointment over LEGO’s mismanagement of the IP for years have finally said “enough”, claiming that LEGO has shamelessly spat on both the fandom and the hard work of Team Kanohi. And they had every rights to feel offended and rejected.
After all, work on the game has progressed so far that neither arguments like “LEGO had every right to make such a decision because it’s their IP” nor any other corporate gibberish could in any way justify what the company has done. What LEGO has done is unacceptable, regardless of the legal issues, and the company cannot be forgotten or forgiven. Not when we’re talking about eight years of hard work wasted for no reason.
Considering LEGO’s relatively friendly policy towards fans of the Danish bricks, the question almost immediately arises: Why did they do it at all? After all, the game’s release would be a tribute to the most important series in LEGO history, and the company had nothing to lose. On the contrary, LEGO could use the fangame as an example of how their products inspire people to be creative. The company stood to reap untold benefits from the successful launch of Masks of Power, and all they had to do was not put obstacles in the way of a studio that had already paid a lot for its project’s progress. So what made LEGO decide to betray the values it has always advertised itself to promote?
Although, according to the information that has reached us, LEGO did not bother to write down the reasoning behind its stupid decision, fans have already come up with their own theories on the subject.
Some have claimed that the LEGO Legal Team recently hired overzealous new employees who have demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of the company’s values, and in their incompetence they made a grave mistake, from which the company is now ashamed to reverse itself.
Others have claimed that the company is planning to launch a new generation of BIONICLE in the upcoming months, and LEGO has made the decision to eliminate any parallel projects, including unofficial creations, which, of course, would be utterly stupid, because there was no worse possible PR move that LEGO could have made right before the return of Bionicle.
Still others have assumed that the problem was the use of the word “BIONICLE” in the game’s logo and title.
There have also been theories that the problem was that Team Kanohi posted the project on Steam.
The most popular theory is that the project was too good, and even the widely-publicized annotation that the game was a fan creation was not enough in the eyes of LEGO to prevent random people from mistakenly considering the game in question to be an official product.
Finally, rumors have surfaced that the decision to kill the most important initiative in LEGO’s history was influenced by LEGO learning about the drama between former Team Kanohi writer (Dead Domain) and V-tuber Kirsche. It’s because the drama had reached its peak only a few weeks before LEGO pulled the trigger, shooting itself in the foot and ruining the relationship between the company and its erstwhile fans.
However, no matter which of the reasons mentioned may be true, none of them even remotely justify or excuse the decision LEGO made, and what the company did is to be condemned. There were a ton of ways to solve this differently. Ask Team Kanohi to remove the “Bionicle” logo from the title, take the game off Steam, delay the release… ■■■■, LEGO could have simply taken over this non-profit project, signed a contract with Team Kanohi that would make the game payable, and the money would go to LEGO. Any option that would lead to the game being released would be good. Team Kanohi was making this game out of passion anyway, and they wouldn’t have made any money from it.
And let’s also remember that apart from the rights to the IP itself, to a few names taken from the G1 canon, and to the design of the sets on which the heroes and opponents were modeled, the company had no rights to anything that was part of Masks of Power. The game code, all mechanics, animations, artificial intelligence, plot, location design, 3D models, effects, soundtrack, etc., are the intellectual property of Team Kanohi alone, which LEGO has no right to decide about.
And since LEGO, with its unforgivable and shameless decision, attacked the fans in the worst possible way, taking away something fans had been waiting for for years, as the company behaved unfairly and without respect for the people thanks to whom the company still exists, Bionicle fans took the only right action a fan can take in such a situation: they started a boycott. A boycott, the goal of which is to force LEGO to reverse its decision to cancel Masks of Power, or if the company continues to spit on the fans, pretending that nothing happened, to cause the company as much PR damage as possible, to hit what is most important for every cold corporation - money.
Bionicle fans stopped buying sets and bricks from official sources, choosing stores so that the money went to private individuals. Or, in the case of purchases from more official sources, so that part of the profit was collected by intermediary companies. Some people began to import bootleg sets from AliExpress en masse to line the pockets of LEGO’s competitors, i.e., Chinese companies selling copies of a product that LEGO had disowned. 3D printing and stores of people selling custom figures inspired by those from LEGO became popular. A significant number of social media users began to flood LEGO profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with posts with the content #RestoreTheMasksOfPower and #RestoreTheBionicle, which resulted in a situation where over 80% of comments under posts on LEGO social media were posts from angry Bionicle fans. In response, LEGO began to remove inconvenient comments and also introduced an algorithm that automatically banned comments containing mentions of Bionicle and Masks of Power.
A lot of new LEGO Ideas projects referring to Bionicle also has appeared, the mass support of which is the most effective method of fighting for the return of Bionicle, but there have been voices that the LEGO Ideas website has blocked some people’s accounts after they recently created profiles on the website and voted for Bionicle projects, which indicates that LEGO will now make it harder for these projects to gain supporters. Maybe it’s some form of revenge. Well, we can verify this thesis only by voting on such MOCs and monitoring if the amount of supporters is growing as it should.
The action of hitting LEGO’s PR was significantly helped by numerous articles from services like IGN, Kotaku, Game Rant, The Brick Fan, The Gamer, BZPower, 80 Level, PCGamesN, etc., which could not remain silent about such a dirty move on the part of LEGO. Of course, the boycott was also actively supported by a lot of Biotubers, who in their videos more or less eloquently criticized LEGO’s double standards and their inept management of the Bionicle IP. So let’s hope LEGO will act responsibly and that the whole unnecessary drama will end with the return of the project that everyone was waiting for and deserved.
There have also been numerous petitions on Change aimed at fighting for the return of Masks of Power or at least raising awareness of the whole thing so that as many people as possible know how LEGO treats its most passionate and creative fans.
In this whole story, LEGO is the undisputed villain, and only corporate puppets would try to defend the company’s decision. But remember: where there’s a villain, there’s also a hero. And also in this situation, a mysterious masked benefactor has appeared. You see, before LEGO, in its impudence, wrote an email to Team Kanohi, the studio members had already sent a few incomplete builds of the game to trusted testers outside the studio. One of them, seeing the injustice that LEGO had committed, like legendary Robin Hood, shared a torrent containing an early build of the Masks of Power Demo with the Bionicle community. This demo is very unfinished; some textures and collisions are missing, the game often crashes, and some quests are impossible to complete. However, this is the closest we could hope for to what we were supposed to get in August of this year. Unless someone from Team Kanohi decides to quietly release a newer build that team members have on their computers (and which has already been presented to us, so it definitely exists and has not been deleted).
According to rumors appearing in the more combative corners of the fandom, there are at least two independent groups of data miners who have taken it upon themselves to try to extract everything they can from the demo code and make use of it. The initiative has been dubbed “World Seed” (a nod to SAO), and its goal is to create an environment for creating games similar to Masks of Power, allowing fans to anonymously complete Masks of Power in secret, without Team Kanohi’s involvement, while also giving other fans a data pack from which people will be able to create their own copies of the game with their own characters and storylines. Unfortunately, since LEGO is currently very hostile towards anything Bionicle-related, work on the “World Seed” is being done in secret, and there is no information about where to find more info about the initiative or how to join the team to offer help. However, since the MoP Demo is available to everyone, anyone with the necessary skills can take on the task of creating their own equivalent of the “World Seed”.
After all, only Team Kanohi was banned directly from working on Masks of Power. And Bionicle fans have already learned that it’s not worth being fair to LEGO and that it shouldn’t announce projects before they’re released.
Therefore, if you also think that what LEGO has done deserves condemnation, spread the word, use the hashtag “#RestoreTheMasksOfPower” wherever you can, sign petitions, support LEGO Ideas projects, maybe even submit your own, and if you have such opportunities, join or create your own groups of independent developers and make your own fangames based on what you can extract from the Masks of Power demo code. Let LEGO face the flood of independent games appearing without announcement from anonymous creators. Let’s show the company that it messed with the wrong fandom.
