Bonus Content Disc/Creatures: The Thorian

The following are transcriptions of the artists' comments for the design gallery "The Creatures of Mass Effect: The Thorian" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2007.

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Matt Rhodes: With the Thorian, there were a few requirements. We knew this was going to be a boss. This was going to be a big, scary boss. It was going to be locked in place, so it was going to be part of the environment; it wasn't going to be moving around too much. So it was almost more of a sculptural piece. Some of the story points were that it was a creature that was old, just ancient, and that corrupted people, that it infected people like a disease, like it released spores. One of the things that we came across later on as well was that it was kind of meat, kind of plant. It was sort of both at the same time. Here are some early developments where I was almost toying with the idea of it starting as a person, or something not unlike a person. But after thousands and thousands and thousands of years in the exact same spot, doing the exact same thing, doing nothing but consuming and corrupting, that it just became this awful pile, this awful mess. So we have the idea of the brain being slowly exposed, becoming larger and larger. In the top right there, that's actually brain mass spilling out of the eyes. The mouth has long since become obsolete, that it's taking in nutrients from elsewhere, that the mouth has been almost tied up with flesh. The open mouth there is kind of a tribute to the salt liquor from the early Star Trek series. That thing terrified me when I was a child, and I figured I should try in some way to pay some tribute to it. That awful circular mouth that does nothing but suck, like a lamprey.

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Matt Rhodes: This is the idea of... You know, it was a really quick sketch, but it was one of those ideas that I just needed to get out. Sort of like, you see mummies on the Discovery Channel, and it's these ancient bodies, and you wonder: what was their life like? What was it like when they walked around? What would it have been like to see their eyes open and them talking through those mouths? I mean, they wouldn't have been mummified at the time, but it's always compelling to me, the idea of, you know... This person played with children. This person was a child. And so trying to bring some of that emotion into this experience, so that it's someone who's been... Whether they did it themselves or had it done to them, they're in a situation that's just awful. You see them and you wonder, like, "oh, what was their humanity like?" And it makes it that much worse. So here, you know, the brain has grown out over thousands of years, even at the mouth. Yeah, you know, kind of heavy-fisted imagery, but again, you know, at this stage, it's good to just get it out there.

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Matt Rhodes: Now, as shameful as it is to admit it, in the creature design process, there was an idea that I stumbled upon kind of by accident, kind of overhearing some conversation that some artists were having, that, you know, no matter how much you try to design scary monsters, if you make them look a little bit like genitalia, they're instantly going to be more terrifying than anything else you could design. So, you know, I'm not going to tell you what this is all based on. We're just going to-- you know, I basically already have. We're just going to leave it at that. But this was just a way of trying to mash together a bunch of just terrible organic stuff, and see in what configuration is it the worst. Is it the most intimidating? Is it the most, like, just terrifying and you just want to run screaming from the room? And these actually freaked me out. I drew them and wanted nothing to do with them. I just-- I wanted them off my desk.

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Matt Rhodes: Here was an idea that I kind of liked, just the idea of... this living infection that it was... you know, had almost attached itself to the wall and was getting bigger and bigger and was barely able to maintain whatever was keeping it suspended, that it had sort of grown according to its position of awkwardness. This, I like his twisted mouth and a collection of asymmetrical eyes off to the side. Now looking at it that all of those eyes are looking at the wall. Like, why would you grow eyes on that side when all you can look at is the wall? You can now see the wall with seven individual eyes and have only one to look out at the rest of the world. All of that sort of stuff, you just... yeah, you just go with it.

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Matt Rhodes: This was coming back to the idea of a mix of meat and plant. This was, you know, almost thinking of the Thorian more as an organ. Once I started heading in that direction... This is actually almost like the heart of a building, and that heart is corrupted. Then it became a matter, too, of looking for different materials, and the tentacles down at the bottom were kind of the idea of a heart that's infected by, even like swabs, by worms, that it's-- that's how it eats but that it's also eating it.

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Matt Rhodes: Here again was a hanging mass of flesh. Something that would always be moving but would never really move anywhere. You can-- I saw a video on, again, the Discovery Channel of an octopus cleaning itself, and for maybe ten seconds all it does is just... there's a flourish of tentacles as it just twists them around, but it looks like this violent flower and it just stops for a moment and you get this explosion of movement. And I like the idea of these tentacles just slowly moving all over itself, just touching itself.

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Matt Rhodes: Oh, this one I hate the very most. This was the idea of the Thorian piled up in a tunnel somewhere that you only got the hint of it, that, you know, here's its feeding mechanism or whatever else, feeding and discharge or whatnot; that it's this terrible thing squeezed into a hole and you don't want to know how deep it goes. You don't want to know how far it goes. And again, just playing up on the idea of, like, the organs and little teeth growing out of places they shouldn't, and a mass of eyes and it just... Again, it was liberating almost, the concept of this stuff, but at the same time you're grossing yourself out.

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Matt Rhodes: Here was the idea of a grub/heart mixture with, you know, some tentacles tacked onto it and some eyes. Looking at the eyes I was kind of remembering Starship Troopers with the brain bug, the big giant creature at the end that was really, really, really gross and it would suck people's brains out through a straw. But once this was painted, a story aspect was brought to my attention that this thing is tens of thousands of years old. Not just old, not just big, but ancient. And this still looked, this looked-- I wasn't comfortable with it. It just looked too young, too new, too fresh, too newborn. And I wanted something that was dustier, that was more ancient. Something that had almost a little bit more of the magnolia flavor of it, like, you know, the Hellboy gods that are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years old.

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Matt Rhodes: And so here we have the Thorian, finally. You know, removing the eyes to remove that intelligence, almost painting in sensory organs instead so that you don't know how it sees you but you know that somehow, through those organs, it's aware of your presence. The teeth and tentacles, the pile of mess beneath it... And some of the shells on top. That was sort of the approach of trying to make it seem more dusty, more aged, that it had built these shells over its body to cover as much of its vulnerable side as it could. And then just the mess up top of just whatever organic material is needed to keep this wreck of a body suspended. Yeah, I love how this guy turned out, and walking up to him in the game, it never ceases to just... gross me out. So I think we accomplished our mission.