Bonus Content Disc/Sci vs. Fi: Mass Effect

This is a transcription of the documentary "Sci vs. Fi: Mass Effect" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2008.

The interviewees are:

• Wayne Brady – actor, comedian
• Heather Campbell – writer, Play magazine
• Jessica Chobot – writer, IGN
• Clifton Collins Jr. – actor
• Keith David – voice actor, Mass Effect
• Jonathan Drubner – comedian
• Shannon Elizabeth – actress
• David Falkner – lead programmer, Mass Effect
• Joel Gourdin – correspondent, X-Play
• Casey Hudson – project director, Mass Effect
• Rampage Jackson – UFC light heavyweight champion
• Drew Karpyshyn – lead writer, Mass Effect
• Geoff Keighley – host, Game Head
• Dr. Ray Muzyka – CEO, BioWare (listed in the game credits as executive producer)
• Paul Semel – game journalist
• Jaret Sinclair-Gibson – BioWare community manager
• Dr. Mike Van Lent – research scientist, USC
• Dr. Ben Wandelt – theoretical physicist
• Preston Watamaniuk – lead designer, Mass Effect
• Derek Watts – lead artist, Mass Effect (listed in the game credits as art director)

Menu Description

Mass Effect's creators and high profile gamers in a lively discussion about the game in this fast-paced documentary from the SCI FI Channel.

Content

Joel Gourdin: Mass Effect is a space opera.
Geoff Keighley: It's one of the most powerful pieces of fiction that I've seen in my lifetime.
Clifton Collins Jr.: It's shot like a movie. It feels like a movie.
Heather Campbell: It's like a lucid dream.
Rampage Jackson: Man, they're going to these new planets, and they're finding different aliens, and they're shooting them in the ass, bam! You know. I'm on it, man. I like that.

Paul Semel: Mass Effect is a grand and epic sci-fi adventure game which kind of plays like 24 in space.
David Falkner: The idea behind it is to try and make a role-playing game for people that helps them live those science-fiction moments from classic movies that we all grew up with.
Drew Karpyshyn: Blade Runner.
Heather Campbell: Over... Star Wars.
Jonathan Drubner: Minus Han Solo.
Preston Watamaniuk: Plus Babylon 5 meets Aliens.
Jonathan Drubner: With Sean Cassidy to the tenth power.
Paul Semel: Yeah.

Ray Muzyka: You're a character in a distant universe, this aspirational fantasy, allowing you to do things you could never do in real life.
Paul Semel: In Mass Effect, you are the hero. You're controlling the action and what you do can change the outcome.
Drew Karpyshyn: Ultimately, you decide the fate of the galaxy. I mean, it doesn't get any bigger than that.
Joel Gourdin: This game is awesome because you can completely customize your hero. You can be a woman. You can be a man. You can be a bald albino with no eyebrows. You can be a horrifically scarred Asian veteran. You have many choices of character, it's very exciting. And it will affect your choices in the game.
Jessica Chobot: The backstory gives you building blocks in which to build your character up. But the choices and how that character develops throughout this Mass Effect story really depends on you.
Drew Karpyshyn: As you play Commander Shepard, you basically encounter several people that will join up with your squad throughout the game if you choose to have them.
Jonathan Druber: It's the ultimate role-playing game. It's kind of a combination of everything you've seen in role-playing games but also in third-person shooters combined into one.
David Falkner: We wanted to put it on a next generation console, Xbox 360, and just push everything to the next level.
Joel Gourdin: You literally can just pull out a gun and just run at the enemy with guns blazing, or you can take a more subtle approach.
Shepard: Let's not do anything we're all going to regret.
Joel Gourdin: You can play it like a chess player. You can play it like, say, a Halo player.
David Falkner: You have biotic powers that you can use where you can influence the physical world using energy attacks, lifting things, sabotaging things with your mind. And then there's your gun. You can shoot aliens in the face. That's fun.
Rampage Jackson: You've got to be on your toes. He's behind you shooting you in the ass. I'm like "man, I'm supposed to shoot you in the ass!" Well, he just shot me in the ass and my ass is on fire because the thing is hot, and it's burning. You can tell the guy's hurting and you can see a hole in his ass. I'm like, "oh, come on now." I'm joking about the hole in the ass, but...

Geoff Keighley: When you play the game and when you see the universe, you just want more. You want to learn more about it, and it's incredibly immersive.
Ray Muzyka: It feels like a universe that you don't want to leave. It feels like a universe you want to continue to adventure in.
Wayne Brady: There's a galaxy and planets and side quests and all these different things.
Unknown commenter: There are so many planets that you can just land on and go explore, even if you're doing nothing related to the main story of the game.
Jessica Chobot: It's just so huge. You're exploring the entire universe and you're making all the decisions. It's freaking sweet. [laughs]
Geoff Keighley: Everyone who plays the game will have a different experience, because it's not a game. It's a piece of interactive fiction that shapes itself to how you want to play the game.
Urdnot Wrex: You. Human. You the one they call Shepard?
Shepard: Is there a problem?
Joel Gourdin: You are actually involved in your character's progression and your choices shape the ending.
Maeko Matsuo: This is an unscheduled arrival. I need your credentials.
Shepard: All you need to know is I have more credentials than you.
Ray Muzyka: You get to be the actor and the director of your own interactive fiction.
Jaret Sinclair-Gibson: Movies are very stagnant. You cannot, you know, yell up at the actor on the screen and say "Hey, move over to the left! There's an alien coming!"
Jessica Chobot: This is like a brand new way of video gaming and storytelling.
Clifton Collins Jr.: It's different. It's thinking and... it's out-thinking you. I mean, part of the fun of playing those games when we were younger is you didn't have to think that much, it's like throwing a rock through the window. But now the window throws rocks back at you and it hides and turns into things.
Geoff Keighley: There are these interesting moral situations in the game. Issues of sacrifice and torture, and all these deep problems where there's not really a right answer.
David Falkner: Is it okay to dispose of one person? Is it okay to dispose of a colony of people? Is it okay to dispose of hundreds of people? Is it okay to commit genocide? These are difficult questions and the answers are not obvious.
Joker: Everybody hang on!
Casey Hudson: It's not even kind of a standard just "choosing good and evil" kind of thing.
Heather Campbell: There's like a gradient of like good and evil.
Keith David: If you make always the meanest, gruffest, most aggressive choice, that doesn't always get you the result that you ultimately want. That's a positive.
Khalisah al-Jilani: You son of a bitch! I'll make sure everyone in the Alliance sees that! Your career is over!
Preston Watamaniuk: What we've tried to do is actually say "listen, there really is no good and evil. There's your choices and the impact that they have on the world."
Heather Campbell: Typically, freedom of choice in a video game is limited to whether or not you want to turn on the system or turn it off.
Keith David: These games are not mindless anymore.
Shepard: If you've got something to say, just say it.
Nihlus Kryik: Your people are still newcomers, Shepard. The galaxy can be a very dangerous place. Is the Alliance truly ready for this?
Preston Watamaniuk: Choice is the most important thing. It's about giving the player as much choice as possible across all aspects of gameplay.
Jonathan Drubner: Most games are essentially a roller coaster, where you get in, you hang on for dear life. If you play it right, you're going to go up here and down here and the big falls and the big screams. Then you're going back down again and then it ends. With Mass Effect, it's more of a road trip. You get in your car, you got your three or four dumb friends, and you guys are going forward. And wherever you get to is going to propel you to the next place. And some dumb decisions you make over here are going to put you in a problem over here. Eventually, you're going to get where you need to go, but the way it's going to unfold is like a mystery.

The Fiction of Mass Effect

Normandy VI: Incoming transmission from Noveria.
Transmission: Normandy, [garbled static] Requesting immediate aid. Please!
Wayne Brady: I think what makes a great video game story is what makes a good movie story is what makes a good novel. You need great heroes, faced with extraordinary circumstance, and they rise to meet that because the faith of others hangs in the balance and they're not afraid to ultimately sacrifice themselves.
Joel Gourdin: What makes for good-science fiction is a healthy blend of head game and-old school storytelling.
Casey Hudson: One of the original goals for Mass Effect was to make a believable science-fiction story for grown-ups.
Geoff Keighley: The science-fiction is really, really good in this game.
Drew Karpyshyn: We've built up this whole history of all the different races that you'll meet, all the different alien species that you'll meet. We've built in detailed character backgrounds for everybody you meet in the game. We've built up a whole political system. It's really this sort of attention to detail and the depth that make Mass Effect what it is.
Preston Watamaniuk: Before we actually set out and did this story, we wanted to create a place where you could tell a lot of stories. That was the most important thing.
Jessica Chobot: What really gets me in this game is the fact that you can explore the universe. It's so Star Trek-y. It's awesome.
Drew Karpyshyn: In Mass Effect, players get to enter this beautiful universe we've created, and then they get to shape it. You are Commander Shepard. You're an elite military agent with the Systems Alliance. That's humanity's military branch as they sort of go out and explore and expand into space.
Geoff Keighley: Shepard is a classic hero.
Casey Hudson: You are a Spectre.
Draw Karpyshyn: Spectres are this sort of galactic agency that is tasked with keeping peace across the galaxy through any means necessary. They're sort of like the James Bonds of the future.
Paul Semel: In the game, humanity has just joined the intergalactic community, if you will. It's like we're just joining the Federation in Star Trek.
Joel Gourdin: The humans are the peons. They're the newbies. Nobody really knows what they're capable of. Nobody really likes them.
Drew Karpyshyn: And the alien races are all kind of judging you to see, you know, "do we trust these guys? Are they going to be helpful? Are they going to be dangerous? Do we have to go to war with them?"
Donnel Udina: You can't just ignore a rogue Spectre. I demand action!
Sparatus: You don't get to make demands of the Council, Ambassador.
Drew Karpyshyn: So it's really up to the player to kind of decide what Commander Shepard becomes, because you are the symbol of humanity as a whole.
Jonathan Drubner: At its core, Mass Effect is all about man's fear of machines becoming too smart, and becoming sentient. And I could not agree more whole-heartedly. Because I have a coffee pot that turns off after 30 minutes if I forget to turn it off. And that scares the shit out of me.

Joel Gourdin: Commander Shepard is kind of like a detective. He's a little bit like Deckard from Blade Runner because he is in pursuit of an evil artificial intelligence.
Alliance soldier: We are under attack! Taking heavy casualties. I repeat: heavy casualties!
Casey Hudson: You're deciding where you're going to go in the galaxy, and what you're going to do to try and expose the rogue Spectre agent that seems to know a little bit more about this stuff than you do.
Heather Campbell: Saren is like a cat dragon with really long ears. And he's kind of got a pout, I think. He's kind of got really sad lips. He's like Garfield, only grey.
Drew Karpyshyn: Saren is a turian. He's an alien species. And he is basically the top Spectre agent in the galaxy.
Jonathan Drubner: Saren is a dick. There, I said it.

Drew Karpyshyn: In the game, he's basically gone rogue. He's turned against everything he believes in. And as you play through the game, you start to find out there's reasons for why he's done this.
Casey Hudson: Saren is really an anti-hero.
Preston Watamaniuk: He's not a cardboard cutout villain that "I have to hate." You may disagree fundamentally with what he's trying to do, but you can sympathize with his plight.
Saren Arterius: If we make ourselves useful, think how many lives can be spared.
Casey Hudson: He's actually gathered a machine army. The geth are kind of a ubiquitous enemy in Mass Effect.
Jessica Chobot: Overpowering artificial intelligence that are going to come and destroy everything and have no soul.
Saren Arterius: Set the charges. Destroy the entire colony. Leave no evidence that we were here.
Casey Hudson: I think it's going to really shock players when they see what the geth can do to human beings.

Jonathan Drubner: In most games, you find that the vibe is "the only good alien is a dead alien." But in Mass Effect, they actually put you in a situation where there's a lot of aliens that may have something to offer you.
Shepard: You're a bounty hunter. What do you get out of going after Saren?
Urdnot Wrex: I'm not in this for the money. I want to be where the action is.
Geoff Keighley: The most powerful moments in the game are those moments where... it's not you talking to another human. It's you talking to other races, about things in the galaxy and how you see things from different perspectives.
Bel Anoleis: You will excuse me if I don't stand up. I have no time to entertain refugees from that urban blight called Earth.
Drew Karpyshyn: There's a lot of depth here. There's more than just, you know, a "blue alien." They've got this whole history and this whole culture.
Sha'ira: If you would speak to him as a fellow soldier, I believe he will listen to you and let the matter be.
Jonathan Drubner: The poor bastards that made this game had to go to great lengths to ensure that they made alien races that didn't just differ in terms of how they looked, but they're actually different in the way they are culturally. The way they are with attitude, the way they are with politics, and fashion sense.
Drew Karpyshyn: There are some pretty attractive-looking aliens. And, you know, I think we're entering an age where people are more open-minded. You know, people are saying traditional sexual roles don't necessarily have to be the way to go. And Mass Effect lets you maybe explore things a little differently because, let's be honest, you know, alien chicks are hot.

Ray Muzyka: We've really tried for a very realistic and very hard science-fiction kind of view, but we also tried to really convey the softer side of science-fiction, the emotional side, the human side.
Joker: Sorry to interrupt, Commander. Got a message from Captain Anderson.
Clifton Collins Jr.: You've got all these morality situations where you're asked to make a judgment call.
Shepard: Too many people died here, Fist. You don't get to walk away.
Clifton Collins Jr.: And so much of what happens afterwards is going to be based on those series of judgment calls, much like life.
Joel Gourdin: Maybe you have to choose between one crew member and another, and whoever you choose is going to live, and whoever you don't choose is going to die, and you're going to have to play the next, you know, ten hours of the game without the presence of that character. And in a game as emotional as Mass Effect is, it's a great loss, and you'll feel it.
Shepard: We'll see that he receives a proper service once the mission is complete. But I need you to stay focused.
Kaidan Alenko: Aye, aye, sir.
Jessica Chobot: You become so invested in the characters that you're running, you actually get emotional. You actually start feeling what your character might be feeling if it was an actual live person.
Wayne Brady: Not every game lets you interact with everyone on screen. Not every game lets you interact with death.
Jessica Chobot: It gets you so involved on such a deep level in a video game.

The Science of Mass Effect

Jessica Chobot: Can I just nerd for a second? Just walking through the ships, walking through the cities, you're just walking around just like "oh my gosh," just dumbfounded. They're huge. It is an entire world on this little disc.
Clifton Collins Jr.: The technology they use today is just-- your jaw hits the ground. It's really a beautiful game.
Mike Van Lent: Building a game like Mass Effect is a major undertaking. You've got hundreds of programmers and artists, you've got millions and millions of dollars, you've got a long history of technologies that you bring in.
Drew Karpyshyn: We had well over a hundred people working on it when we were in full production. It took about four years to make. You really have to start by limiting yourself so that you can actually make some progress.
Derek Watts: The art were less for actual science, the writers were quite a bit more, so there was always this combat between the two.
Casey Hudson: Should we allow time travel? Should we allow instant space travel?
Paul Semel: How do we actually go to other planets? Because thanks to Einstein, that jerk, we can't go faster than the speed of light. And the speed of light isn't all that fast. I mean, it's faster than my Toyota, but it's not that fast.
Casey Hudson: Mass Effect is, as a metaphor, the title, but it's also kind of the slang term in the Mass Effect universe for dark energy.
Preston Watamaniuk: Dark energy sort of is this mysterious force.
Casey Hudson: It's actually drawn from real-life science news.
Ben Wandelt: It's an energy that pervades the universe, and it causes the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
Jonathan Drubner: Magnons, protons, electrons, that kind of stuff, that you can use to harness to create... What was the question again? I don't feel qualified to answer this. [laughs]

Ben Wandelt: Gravity acts repulsively on it, so if I had a lump of dark energy here, it would actually start inflating and it would actually create a new universe. That would be very exciting, but I guess the excitement would be somewhat short-lived. [laughs]
Joel Gourdin: I don't really understand how mass effect works, but you can like, warp space and time and throw people around.
Casey Hudson: It powers the starships. It really powers all of the cool technology in Mass Effect, and yet it still kind of has a hook into being plausible in real-life science.
Paul Semel: The technology they use seems realistic for the setting. It doesn't seem sort of fantastic and like, oh, you know, "now we have a thing that turns monkeys into ice cream!"

Geoff Keighley: BioWare has really carved out a niche as I think probably the best developer in the world of role-playing games.
Joker: Citadel business. We've got a Council Spectre aboard.
Casey Hudson: At BioWare, we've been working on this kind of game for a long time, and it's been an evolution.
Drew Karpyshyn: We've finally been able to take everything we've learned from our previous games, and we've really kind of pushed that to a whole other level.
Jessica Chobot: It's finally a next-gen game. It's taking that hardware that we've been promised and promised and promised, and like really, truly utilizing it.
David Falkner: Mass Effect is a really high-impact system, and each one of the components that we use is really high fidelity.
Jonathan Drubner: You've got all this stuff in the game. You have the exploration, and the story, and the action shooter, and you're modding weapons and you're changing armor, and yet you get inside and play the game, and you don't feel like you're wrestling with any of that. It's just fun.
Ray Muzyka: That's really what the essence of Mass Effect is. You always have something great to do.
Jonathan Drubner: You know, you don't taste sugar and egg and water and milk. You taste cake.

Paul Semel: One of the things that Mass Effect does really, really well is they make the characters very believable.
Jessica Chobot: They sit there and they turn and they watch you walk, and you don't even have to interact with them. They're reacting to you.
Greg Zeschuk: You say something mean to a character and they look back at you with sort of a sullen look. You know, you've done something. That's story-telling. You don't have to have this big, long discussion around it.
David Falkner: You can pull in the camera really tight to take a look at the smallest emotions on the characters' faces.
Ray Muzyka: You don't have to have a lot of words. You can sometimes just have a tilt of a head or a raised eyebrow that really convey as much as hundreds of words can convey in other games.
Shannon Elizabeth: There's little tells that people give off, little movements of the eyes, little things that they do that actually you have to catch and that actually gives you a clue into something else. That's pretty amazing.
Jonathan Drubner: You can actually tell when a character's lying. You can tell the way they're feeling about you. You can tell when they're nervous, when perhaps they're not happy with the decision that you made as their leader. You're like "How? I don't even have that much expression in my face."
Paul Semel: Virtual acting isn't anything new. You see it all the time in movies now, in movies like Beowulf and Pixar movies. A lot of times, something's kind of off about it and it's almost like you're watching an old Godzilla movie where the guy is talking but the words don't quite match up.
David Falkner: The technical accomplishment that was most impressive was the head system that we came up with. Meshes for the actual shape of the face, custom animations for each of their facial gestures, dozens and dozens of sliders for things like what is the distance between the bottom of your nose and the top of your lip.
Casey Hudson: Everyone seems to create a completely different character and that's one thing that never ceases to amaze me is how people all find their own way to play this game.

Drew Karpyshyn: We've taken some of the great voice acting talent, we have an amazing group of actors that have contributed to this project.
David Falkner: We had really impressive performances from some famous actors like Keith David and Seth Green.
Keith David: The quality of CGI is so improved these days that, you know, I mean, it's amazing. It's amazing.
Shannon Elizabeth: As long as, you know, these graphics don't replace actors altogether, which has always been the long term fear that it could happen.
Clifton Collins Jr.: Nothing that will spoil a good video game than a shitty actor.
Wayne Brady: It's an incredible picture of what you can do if you really take your time and build it right.

Drew Karpyshyn: The great thing about Mass Effect is right from the start, we've envisioned it as a huge trilogy of games.
Jonathan Drubner: The jerk that you were in the first one or the hero that you were in the first one is the character you're starting with in the second one.
Drew Karpyshyn: People are going to see that choices they made in the first game will carry through the second game and even all the way into the third game.
Casey Hudson: It really has taken us all of these many years to build up the amount of technology that it requires.
Preston Watamaniuk: The 360 really allowed us to build the game we wanted to build this time, with photorealistic environments, photorealistic characters.
Derek Watts: The sound, the graphic quality, I mean, we pushed it pretty hard.
David Falkner: It's dedicated to that HDTV experience which gives you really high definition visuals.
Jaret Sinclair-Gibson: It is the game that everybody wants it to be.
Wayne Brady: If games are this hot right now, I'm excited about maybe by the time that I'm 50, you could almost be in something like the holodeck. And you could play this game and get lost in the game and play it for days and days, and really feel like you're in the middle of it.

Shiala: You have been given a great gift: the experience of an entire people. It will take time for your mind to process this information.

Geoff Keighley: I think a lot of people are going to play this game not once but three, four times, just to see how things would have gone differently.
Shannon Elizabeth: You can change it every time you play. It's like a brand new game every time.
Jessica Chobot: This is a thousand games in one game.
Drew Karpyshyn: I think we've taken all these elements and combined them to really make an experience that is really the pinnacle of interactive story-telling and immersion in gameplay.
Geoff Keighley: I can't wait till people play this game and play through it, so I can talk to them about what they did in the game, and also what the choices were that they made.
Clifton Collins Jr.: I could see this game sucking up a part of my life. [laughs] So if I don't make any movies for the next couple of years, you'll know why. "Lost in space."

Trivia

• Jessica Chobot would later lend her voice and her face to the character of the investigative reporter Diana Allers in Mass Effect 3.