On January 22nd, 2021, the head admin of Monkey Quest Reborn received an email from the parent company of Monkey Quest's producer, Nickelodeon. The email requested that the Monkey Quest Reborn team cease operation immediately due to unauthorized use of assets, trademark infringement, and copyright infringement.
After validating the legitimacy of the email, Necromatical reached out to the concerned company in an attempt to acquire a license or some form of permission to continue working on the game. This process took nearly an entire month, and in that time the community was not aware of the business going on in the background and development proceeded as usual. However, some community members reported evidence at the time that their was a disruption in the project around this time: the Monkey Quest Reborn website was offline for an unknown extended period of time (at least a week) as well as some of its other social media pages.
Ultimately, on February 17th, 2021, the fate of the project was sealed when one of the admins received word that their request for a license was denied and that they would need to close indefinitely.
Within the day, Alex the Wizard, Community Manager for the project, made the closure announcement on the project's public Discord server, followed up with a QnA live stream on Twitch to answer the community's questions. Shortly after, Necromatical, as Managing Director of the project's company, provided more insight into the situation as well as a portion of the take-down letter received to serve as proof for the community. It was here that the project closure date was announced.
Two days later, on February 19th, 2021 at 6 PM EST, Monkey Quest Reborn closed indefinitely. The project's website and social media were removed and the existing Discord server transitioned into a general Monkey Quest server.
As of now, the developers seem to have disbanded and gone their separate ways, no statements were made about what was next for them.
Having all this happened, it is my unpopular (likely) opinion that Monkey Quest should be left to rest now. It served as a great virtual and memorable experience at the time of its vitality, however, over the years following its original closure, its nostalgic constitution has been heavily tainted. I'm not sure about anyone else, but nowadays anytime I think of Monkey Quest,one of its discontinued remake attempts pops into mind. This consequently has made me fail to recall much, if any, actual play time from the original game. It makes me wonder what I am actually doing here.
Alas, I am sorry for the rant, I'm just a member of the community that has sat back to watch it all play out for a long time, while also clearing some stuff up and hoping to get search engines to index some of this for when the project is searched.
Cheers.