What happened to Canvas Rider?

Canvas Rider has been discontinued and Free Rider 3 is the replacement, a lot of people are wondering why and I hope this post will help explain it.

My name is Ira, owner of OneMoreLevel.com and co-founder of Kano Games. I am the owner and founder of the Free Rider series. Pete and I spent a lot of time and money building the original Free Rider 1 and 2. Maxime is a talented guy who saw an opportunity and made Canvas Rider based off the code of FR2 and used the same graphics, track encoding and other things. I had mixed feelings about this, on one hand he did a great job and created an awesome game and community, but also he was not 100% authorized to do this in the first place. If he had made his own game from scratch, it would be a different story, but he used elements from copyrighted work.

I have wanted to make Free Rider 3 for years but the brand has been diluted by all the clones. I e-mailed Maxime and he understood this, and that is why CR is closing up. Kano Games is an awesome team of hard-working people with a passion for games, and I think it shows on the quality of this website. Right now we are aware that Free Rider 3 is not perfect but we are working hard on an HTML5 version that will correct all of the concerns.

I want everyone to understand that shutting down the clones is what will enable the future of Free Rider to continue and put the proper resources behind it. Without this step, the community will slowly die as one-person operations cannot take the game further and they will always be legally and morally in the wrong.

I ask everyone to have patience, and send in their ideas on what they want to see added or changed in Free Rider 3. I want to make a game that is as revolutionary as when I first released Free Rider 1.