5 Years of Masks of Power

On November 4th, 2016, a teaser trailer for a game titled “Bionicle: The Masks of Power” was uploaded to YouTube. This game, which began as a small passion project, would grow to become one of the largest BIONICLE Fan projects ever, with a multinational team of talented developers, and a future release on Steam. Join us as we look back at those 5 years to see just how far we’ve come, and how we’ve reached where we are today.

BIONICLE: Masks of Power began with only 2 developers: Jocool1231 and his brother, y8u332. After around one year of development, they released the very first trailer for the game, with a playable alpha build releasing soon after. It was… extremely bare, offering little to do besides running around the island of Mata Nui. But it was enough to spark interest in the game, and provided a foundation for Masks of Power to be built on in the years to come.

The first major update would come in March of 2017, bringing with it new locations, basic quests, and powers to the titular masks. This would be the start of the game’s initial growth, thanks in large part due to TTV, a LEGO-focused YouTube channel, who made a video highlighting the game, showing it off to a much wider audience. Thanks to that first video, more people started to notice the game that we were making. More updates quickly followed, and by the end of the year the game would feature combat, multiple types of Rahi, and a plethora of other changes.

It was around this time that things inside the team began to change. Thanks to another video from Eljay of TTV, the team had grown substantially. With so many new people joining, the scope of the game that Jocool1231 and y8u332 wanted to create had drastically increased beyond what they had when they first started, and the limitations of the game were beginning to show. This desire to create something more than what the current state of Masks of Power would allow is what drove the decision to start over— to recreate BIONICLE: Masks of Power from the ground up. This rebuilt version of the game, which would come to be described as version “2.0,” is what would take the focus of the majority of the team moving forward. However, that original project, which was dubbed as the “Legacy” version of the game, was not abandoned. It would receive 2 more updates by the end of 2018, adding more to the world and gameplay, while 2.0 was being worked on in the background. This split between versions of the project prompted us to make one other change: our name. BIONICLE: Masks of Power was no longer just one game. It was becoming a multifaceted project that would only continue to grow. A project that was created by a team: Team Kanohi

After Legacy received it’s 1.4 update, things went quiet for a while. Much of the team was being restructured to focus their work on 2.0. And while progress was being made, any type of playable version of the game would still be years off. People were eager to see more of what we had been silently working on, and we wanted to show it off, as well as get feedback on the new style of gameplay we were developing. This desire culminated in an idea called “Trials of the Great Spirit-” A tech demo of sorts for some of the ideas that would appear in 2.0. It would be relatively simple in terms of art and presentation, focusing entirely on fine-tuning the gameplay. With this idea, the next chapter of Team Kanohi would begin, with the project now covering 3 separate branches: Legacy, 2.0, and Trials of the Great Spirit.

BIONICLE: Trials of the Great Spirit would be released on April 28th, 2020, giving people their first taste of what BIONICLE: Masks of Power would ultimately become. The game featured 12 unique mask powers, a radically improved combat system, elemental abilities, and much more. But there were still elements of it that weren’t as fleshed out as we would have liked. Much of the art in the first release of TOGS was placeholder art that we intended to touch up in a later update to the game. We also had plans to expand the scope of the game beyond the tutorial-like Tatari area that was playable, with plans for dungeon-like areas for each Toa as we developed them. However, the work that we put into TOGS proved to be far more taxing than we had originally expected. What was originally intended to be a simple tech demo that wouldn’t take resources away from 2.0 had become the primary focus of the team for almost a whole year. And the 3 separate branches of the project were starting to become confusing—especially to newcomers. While we had high expectations for Trials of the Great Spirit, we ultimately decided to not follow through with the original vision for the game, both to devote more resources into developing 2.0, and because we had already received the feedback that we were looking for. TOGS would receive it’s final update on June 20, 2020.

With TOGS discontinued, we now had the stage set for putting all of our focus into 2.0… almost. There was still Legacy, which at this point had gone nearly 2 full years without any sort of update. And while much of the team was split between working on TOGS and 2.0, Jocool had been silently working on Legacy in the background, with an update that was shaping up to be the largest yet. With TOGS no longer taking away as many resources, more work could be done on Legacy, making this update that, for so long seemed like nothing but a distant possibility, start to look like more and more of a reality.

In the coming months, things continued to escalate internally. More new members joined the team, more progress was being made on 2.0, and development on Legacy version 1.5 was steadily progressing. We were eager to shift the entire team towards working on 2.0. And we were also eager to finally release this massive update to Legacy—one that would serve as a proper sendoff for the game. So, after almost 2 and a half years, the final update to Masks of Power: Legacy was released on May 22, 2021. This new version was practically unrecognizable from it’s previous iterations, and featured greatly improved visuals, overhauled locations, and a proper story, giving players far more to do and explore than ever before. With this update, Legacy was finally complete. The game, first started 5 years earlier by Jocool and his brother, had finally come to fruition.

But this was not the end of Team Kanohi—it was only the beginning. With the final release of Legacy, the stage was set for our biggest reveal yet: 2.0. For over 4 years, this complete overhaul of the game had been teased and hinted at as we worked on it behind the scenes. But nothing from the game itself had been shown, apart from Trials of the Great Spirit, which at this point was vastly outdated. After spending so much time silently developing the game, we were finally ready to show the first look at the 2.0. On August 10, 2021, during the 810NICLE day event which celebrated the 20th anniversary of the theme, we unveiled the first ever teaser for BIONICLE: Masks of Power. The trailer showed off the beautiful environments of Mata Nui, the Rahi that inhabited it, and, most exciting of all, the fact that the game would be releasing on Steam. This reveal brought with it the rebranding of most of our social media back to BIONICLE: Masks of Power, reflecting the renewed focus of the project on one, singular game. Since the reveal, the trailer has reached over 200,000 views on YouTube, with the game receiving over 30,000 wishlists on Steam. We were finally able to put all of our efforts towards creating the game that we wanted to make, and we had more people than ever excited about what we were working on. 

And that brings us to today. We as a team have come a very long way in these past 5 years, growing from a size of just 2 to over 40 members spanning the entire globe. BIONICLE: Masks of Power has undergone many changes, but the vision throughout has remained the same: to create the purest Bionicle experience we can for fans to enjoy. Thanks to all the hard work from our extremely talented team, that vision is clearer now than it has ever been before. To all the fans that have been with us since that first trailer 5 years ago, to the new fans who are hearing of the project for the first time, and to those who have joined anywhere in between, thank you. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are today without you, and we hope that you’ll continue to support us in the years to come. It’s been an amazing journey to reach where we are today, and we can’t wait for what the future will bring.

If you want to play through the history of Team Kanohi, both Masks of Power: Legacy and Trials of the Great Spirit can be found on the Legacy page of our website. While they no longer reflect what BIONICLE: Masks of Power will look like once it’s complete, these projects have been an important part of our history as a team. Be sure to also join our discord server, or follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to be kept up-to-date as we continue to work on BIONICLE: Masks of Power.

Thank you for reading, and may the Great Spirit guide you.