Imagine spending nearly a decade of your life, on and off, working on a project only to have it cancelled as you reach a major milestone. That’s exactly what happened to the team at Unmasked Games (formerly Team Kanohi). Just weeks before it was due to release a demo for its fan-made Bionicle title, Masks of Power, The Lego Group reached out, asking it to “shut down our project in its entirety and remove Bionicle: Masks of Power from the public eye”.
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After eight long years of development, Bionicle: Masks of Power is no more.
“It’s an emotionally complex time,” the team tells me as I sit down with Unmasked Games’ founder Jordan Willis, PR manager and narrative designer Mark Stefely, and creative director Eric Beelow, to discuss the studio’s past, present, and future now that it’s no longer working on Masks of Power.
Working On A Game From The Age Of 12
Bionicle: Masks of Power was a labour of love, a labour to which between 50 and 60 people contributed their time over the past eight years. It has taken many different forms over that time, with a legacy version, an early tech demo, and multiple phases all part of its development history.
For Willis, Masks of Power had been part of his life for almost half of it. He was 12 when he started formulating his ideas for the project, and is now 22. “It started when I was sitting around one day, and I was thinking, ‘You know, Bionicle never had a really good video game,’” he tells me. “My brother had been wanting to make video games with me for a while. So I figured that would be an opportunity.”
With no formal qualifications or training in game development, Willis’ skills came from his brother’s teachings and his thirst to make Masks of Power “really, really good.” Both his and Stefeley’s skills have “grown a ton throughout the process of this project,” Beelow expresses.
It was a really, really cool experience seeing this passion-driven project grow into something as big as it is now, as big as it became.
Stefley and Beelow (who had also been part of another Bionicle fan game) joined the project later, in 2017 and 2021, respectively, but their passion for Bionicle matched that of Willis. “I’ve been a huge Bionicle fan all my life,” Stefeley tells me.“ I got the chance to join the team as a writer, and I was fleshing out the world. It was a really, really cool experience seeing this passion-driven project grow into something as big as it is now, as big as it became.”
Unmasked Games was keen to express that, although Masks of Power had been in the works for eight years, it was never a full-time gig during that period, but that didn’t make its closure any less devastating.
The team juggled school, freelance and contract work, and full-time jobs while developing the game. Beelow, for example, worked for a time as a professional composer, before taking a more stable job that allowed him to invest “real time” into the project.
This latest phase, a demo showcasing the game’s first area, had been in development for three years. It was just a smaller vertical slice of the full game, approximately one-twelfth of what Unmasked Games had envisioned, and had reached the polishing phase ahead of its imminent release. This section was designed to serve as the foundation for Masks of Power, enabling the team to replicate the systems, physics, and other elements that would help speed up development. But then Lego came knocking.
The Day Masks Of Power Came To An End
From the outset, Unmasked Games knew it wouldn’t make any money from the project, having bound themselves strictly to Lego’s ‘Fair-Play Policy’. It never took donations, included disclaimers anywhere possible, and adhered to every rule. Their goal was simply to make a video game inspired by their love of Bionicle, something which, at first, Lego had no issue with.
Willis speaks of the interactions he and the team had with Lego over the years. “I first reached out to them when I started the project to say ‘hey, would this be cool?’”, he recalls. “But unfortunately, they don’t have any way to contact employees at Lego unless you already know one. So I just sent a message to their customer support line and they were like, ‘okay, sure, go ahead, kid.’”
As the project gained traction, garnering tens of thousands of YouTube views, Lego left the team to its own devices. Until that fateful day.
Lego made it very clear that we had to take the whole thing down.
“It was an email that led to a couple of meetings,” Beelow tells me. “It was a pretty short exchange, one short meeting and two emails. Lego made it very clear that we had to take the whole thing down.
“Lego is a giant company, and you’re talking to someone, but there’s a whole department over here and there’s another department over there, and someone new gets hired and sees something they haven’t seen before. It felt as though we had just wound up in an unfortunate place in the gears of bureaucracy. We never stood a chance.”
The initial email came through on Willis’ birthday, of all days. He recalls being really worried, but expected, “They’d probably just ask us to take down the Steam page or something, and we couldn’t release it on Steam.” But that wasn’t the case.
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The next step for Willis was to inform Beelow, who then had to make the team aware of the heartbreaking news. “I did it in video form,” he says. “It felt like the most personal way to do it in a way where my tonality would also be shared.”
It was at this point that Stefely, who ironically works doing social media for a Bricks and Minifigs, a store specialising in Lego products, found out. “I had just started work for the day, and I saw Garrett had posted a video in our Discord,” he remembers. “I ran into the bathroom at work, pulled up the video on my phone, and watched the whole thing. It was just immediately devastating.”
We’re going to stay in the fight.
It would have been easy to disband as everyone moved on with their lives, but the team had fostered far too strong a bond. “Almost nobody wanted to do that, which was very encouraging,” Beelow recalls with a smile. “Everyone was like, ‘nah, no, we’re going to stay in the fight.’” And in an act of defiance, after throwing around names like “Spite Studios”, Team Kanohi rebranded to Unmasked Games.
Moving On To Pastures New With Unmasked Games
When I spoke to the team four days after it went public with the cancellation, Willis’ feelings still hadn’t sunk in. “I honestly still don’t know how I feel about it,” he says. “It’s eight years that I’ve been doing this. So it feels like it’s not real. Cause it’s over, but it’s not over.”
Sefeley tells me, “Immediately after the takedown came down, there were already people brainstorming new ideas, thinking about, ‘Okay, what can we do from here?’” Beelow adds, “There are a lot of assets that have nothing to do with Bionicle that we can keep. And there’s also like a pretty big opportunity for us to make something awesome and kind of have this just kind of be part of our story, which I think is an exciting concept.”
The team quickly and reluctantly moved on from Masks of Power, and despite an initial overwhelming sense of sorrow, that quickly changed to pride. “It was really refreshing. There is so much optimism within our team that I think speaks a lot to how incredible this team is that we’ve built over the years,” Beelow tells me.
More than anything, we just want to make a game that scratches a lot of the same itches that the last one did.
Unmasked Games is now in the conception phase, and it has a lot to consider. The plan is to move “from an all-volunteer team to something more official”, which presents challenges of its own, and that’s before it even starts to think about its next game. But that’s not to say it hasn’t.
“Our internal server has never been more active. There are new concepts coming in, people have ideas, the gears are turning, and it feels really cool,” the team says. “More than anything, we just want to make a game that scratches a lot of the same itches that the last one did, but, you know, without the hindrance of having to comply with a kid’s brand that apparently, no longer likes us.
“While we do want this to be spiritually something people are going to connect with and recognize, we aren’t just going to do an asset swap. We’re going to build an original story that stands on its own, a world that stands on its own.”
The studio admits that while there’s a long road ahead, it has something it didn’t have when it started eight years ago — a following. It opens avenues like crowdfunding and external financing. Although that path remains unclear for now, Beelow says, “It’s going to be something that people who were looking forward to our last game can also look forward to quite a bit. And that’s something we’re very much fighting to maintain.”
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