EA BioWare’s wildly successful and influential space opera Mass Effect is being turned into a TV series, Variety has reported.
The latest video game to make the jump to the small screen, the Mass Effect show is being written by Daniel Casey, who previously worked on Fast & Furious 9 and Kin. Also of note, the show is being produced by Amazon, which has previously worked on the highly successful Fallout and less successful Halo shows.
Beyond the fact that we know it is happening there’s almost no further details on the upcoming show, but eagled-eyed fans will remember a time when the series was optioned for the big screen.
Mass Effect was originally going to be made into a movie back in the 2010s, but the film never materialised. BioWare’s lead writer Mac Walters explained to Business Insider in 2021 that the team had struggled to figure out how to tell the epic tale in a modest amount of time.
“It felt like we were always fighting the IP,” Walters said. “What story are we going to tell in 90 to 120 minutes? Are we going to do it justice?”
Since then a number of successful adaptations have graced TV, such as The Last of Us, The Witcher, and the aforementioned Fallout, while video-game movies have largely continued to struggle. The decision was likely made to switch the project toward the small screen to give the story room to breathe, and to serve as a further reason for Amazon’s 200 million Prime subscribers to utilise the service’s Prime Video streaming service.
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What Do we Know About the Plot?
Assuming it’ll be a faithful adaptation of the original Mass Effect’s story, we know quite a bit. If the production team decide to take it in a different direction, and not focus on Commander Shepard and the crew of the Normandy’s efforts to combat the existential Reaper menace, then the plot is anyone’s guess.
If I just said a bunch of words that mean nothing to you, then let me break the storyline of the original game down. Spoilers for a 17 year old game ahead.
The Mass Effect series takes place in the 2100’s, in a Milky Way galaxy teeming with alien life. Humanity has ascended to the stars and has joined the galactic community, specifically the Citadel Council which acts like an interstellar UN, and aims to keep the peace between species that don’t always see eye to eye.
Commander Shepard is a member of an elite military unit, Spectre, and begins unravelling a plot by an alien radical, Saren Arterius, to invite the ancient alien lifeforms known as the Reapers to harvest the Milky Way galaxy of all life.
It’s a plot that, in the games, offers a number of ways for the story to progress. Is Shepard a loose cannon, or a smooth talker? Who dies during the games’ pivotal moments? What is the fate of the galaxy? The answer to these questions is different depending on how you play the game, and is something that the show will struggle to replicate.
In fact, a former BioWare writer, David Gaider, said some time ago on X that the whole idea of a Mass Effect TV show (or one for Dragon Age, BioWare’s other series) was flawed in that it couldn’t replicate what made the games work: their malleability.
“Said TV Show will need to pick whether will be male or female. Boom, right off the bat you’ve just alienated a whole bunch of the built-in fan base who had their hopes up,” Gaider said.
“Those protagonists are designed to be a bit of a blank slate… that the player fills out with their decisions. That’s not going not work for a passive medium. So, suddenly, the protagonist will have their own personality story. That will be weird.
” had to take into account the player’s agency. They were kind of the shell upon which that player’s emotional engagement was delivered — usually through the companions and the choices themselves. Choice heightened engagement. Interactivity was the star, not the plot.”
It’s a fair take, and it’ll be interesting to see how the show runners tackle the issue of either creating a ‘canon’ Shepard, or telling their own story within the Mass Effect universe, as with Amazon’s Fallout.
Either way, we don’t expect the show to launch for at least another few years, so get comfortable.
