Massive Effect: a documentary crew was filming at BioWare when the lights went out (games news).

Two years ago a documentary crew started filming at BioWare to tell the story of one of gaming’s great studios. They got rather more of a story than they had planned. Deadline reports that Massive Effect: The BioWare Story, now billed as a film about the studio’s final days, is in production for Canada’s Super Channel. Super Channel is planning a major festival run and a world premiere next year.

The timing is grim. Electronic Arts announced BioWare’s closure on 21 October, ending the Edmonton studio and, as we reported at the time, the next Mass Effect with it. Fans have been signing petitions ever since. The cameras kept rolling through the past few weeks, so the film has caught the end as well as the long history before it.

That history is worth telling. BioWare was founded in Edmonton in 1995 by three medical doctors, who apparently decided the world needed fewer prescriptions and more dialogue wheels. The studio went on to sell some 100 million RPGs across Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Between them, those games built two of the century’s most fully realised original SF and fantasy worlds, and gave a generation the chance to agonise for twenty minutes over whether to be nice to a krogan.

Akash Sherman writes and directs, and Shane Fennessey and Adam Scorgie produce for Fennessey Films and Score G Productions. Sherman made Clara (2018), about an astronomer searching for life on other worlds, which is broadly what Commander Shepard spent three games doing, with fewer reapers. Interviewees include former Mass Effect director Casey Hudson, Douglas Reilly, Geoff Keighley and Victor Lucas, along with many long-time BioWare developers. Jennifer Hale, the voice of the female Shepard and so, for many players, the real Commander, is also taking part. The film-makers have set up a site where the BioWare community can share photos and videos for a chance to appear in it.

A film that began as a celebration and has become a wake is the sort of plot twist BioWare’s writers would have built a whole third act around. The difference is that this time nobody got to pick the Paragon option.