‘Mass Effect’ Studio’s Final Chapter Is Officially Being Turned Into a Documentary

Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider‘s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.

One of the best arguments for replaying a BioWare game is finding out whether you can bring yourself to make a different choice this time. You can start Mass Effect promising to take Commander Shepard down a completely different path and still end up doing the same thing because you remember how the alternative felt. Throughout both Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the entire Dragon Age franchise, the studio made a habit of giving players decisions they would think about even after putting down the controller.

That reputation grew out of an unlikely start. Three medical doctors founded BioWare in Edmonton in 1995, and their basement startup went on to make games in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars before creating fantasy and science fiction settings of its own. Two years before Electronic Arts announced the studio’s closure last month, a team of Edmonton filmmakers had already begun asking the people who built it how they pulled that off.

Fennessey Films and Score G Productions have announced Massive Effect: The BioWare Story, an independent feature documentary written and directed by Akash Sherman. The documentary is currently in production, with the team targeting a 2027 world premiere and major festivals. Producers Shane Fennessey and Adam Scorgie now plan to cover the studio’s final chapter alongside its rise. Fennessey said:

“We started this film two years ago, before Dragon Age: The Veilguard released, before the Anthem servers shut down, and before the EA buyout was even announced. With the shocking news of the closure, we now have the responsibility of telling its final chapter.”

“We started this film two years ago, before Dragon Age: The Veilguard released, before the Anthem servers shut down, and before the EA buyout was even announced. With the shocking news of the closure, we now have the responsibility of telling its final chapter.”

Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.

You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.

• This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
  fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
• You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
  everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
• The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
  every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
• You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.

You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.

• One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
  each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
• You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
  somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
• The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
  harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
• You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
  it.

You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.

• Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
  a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
• You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
  Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
• The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
  rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
• You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
  got told wrong.

You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.

• Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
  which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
• You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
  something nobody thought to test for.
• The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
  every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
• Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
  difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.

Who Is Involved in ‘Massive Effect: The BioWare Story’?

Image via BioWare

Image via Electronic Arts

Image via Bioware

Image via BioWare

The documentary features all three BioWare founders, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip, as well as Casey Hudson, who directed Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and Jennifer Hale, the voice of the female Commander Shepard. Longtime BioWare developers David Gaider, Drew Karpyshyn, Mark Darrah, and Mac Walters also appear. That lineup lets the documentary trace how a game took shape from several sides, including the people who ran the studio, wrote its characters, and gave them a voice.

Fans can contribute, too. The producers are inviting players to share personal stories, photos, and videos for possible inclusion through the documentary’s official website. For a studio whose games let players make the same story their own, there’s something fitting about asking them what they remember and which choices still stick with them.

Super Channel commissioned the documentary in Canada, and Jhod Cardinal of Upstream Flix is handling worldwide sales. The producers are targeting a festival premiere in 2027, but a specific premiere date and wider release plans are still to be announced. Stay tuned at Collider for more.