The Mass Effect series set a new standard for science fiction storytelling. Part of its appeal was a grounding in real science. Mac Walters is the CEO of Worlds Untold, but before founding his own company he was a writer on Mass Effect, a lead writer on Mass Effect 2 and 3, creative director of Mass Effect: Andromeda, and project director for the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. He joined host Sean Mobley and The Museum of Flight's Curator of Spaceflight and Contemporary Aerospace Geoff Nunn for a conversation about the ways science and fiction intersected in Bioware's legendary video game series.
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Transcript after the player.
Cover image courtesy of Bioware.
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SEAN MOBLEY: The Flight Deck is made possible by listeners like you. Thank you to the donors who sustain the Museum of Flight. To support this podcast and the museum’s other educational initiatives, visit museumofflight.org/podcast.
Hello and welcome to The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I’m your host, Sean Mobley. In this season all about space stations, it’s awesome to pause and take a break from reality to talk non-reality. The Mass Effect video game series is one of the most beloved and influential pieces of science fiction media of the 21st century. One of the hearts of this series is the Citadel, a massive, sprawling space station that serves as a hub of galactic governance, innovation, commerce, and cultural exchange.
Mac Walters was one of the key creative minds behind the Mass Effect trilogy. Now, today, he is the founder of video game company World Untold, but he joined me and the Museum of Flight’s space curator, Geoff Nunn, for a conversation back to his time during Mass Effect, where he discussed the real-world roots of the Mass Effect universe.
00:01:24
Mac Walters, thank you so much for joining us today on The Flight Deck.
MAC WALTERS: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
SM: Yeah. And also joining us is Geoff Nunn here, past podcast guest, I should say, here. Geoff, welcome back to The Flight Deck.
GEOFF NUNN: Thank you, Sean. Excited to be back on and for this conversation.
SM: Now, Mac, I like asking people this question, especially folks like you, who are so imaginative. But what is your first memory of looking up at the stars?
MW: I was always fascinated with just—I think, like most of us—just staring up at the night sky, seeing what was up there. First memory is hard to describe, but I do remember clearly having, you know, a map of the solar system on my wall and just lying awake at night, just staring and wondering what’s out there. What could it be?
00:02:24
And on top of that, as just sort of a fun anecdote, I remember begging my mom to buy me those little glow-in-the-dark stars that you could put on your—and she was like, “Yeah, yeah. You could put a few of them up.” And my whole ceiling was just covered in those. Right? So you’d shut off the lights at night, and you could star up and see that. But, you know, I think that’s where a lot of my, you know, sort of curiosity stems from, is just the—what are the possibilities? What’s out there? What could be on those worlds? Right?
SM: So did you grow up kind of interested in space, or was it kind of just part of a larger cultural side for you?
MW: I was a bit of a space nerd as a kid, for sure. Like, I still remember there was a—I don't know—like, a radio show. And they were—you know, they do quizzes and stuff like that. And so they were asking, you know, “Okay. Well, what’s the smallest planet in the solar system?” And everyone’s calling in saying Pluto, and I’m bugging my mom. I was pretty young. I said, “I know the answer. I know the answer.” Right? And so I actually got through, gave my answer, and then start, you know, going into some other—I can’t even remember what details. And I think they thought I was pretty humorous, but I won the prize. And so I was very into it.
00:03:38
From a fictional standpoint though, I think what’s interesting is what caught my—I mean, obviously, Star Wars was huge for me. But, like, reading, I was—I kind of dove into fantasy first for some reason and then kind of transitioned into reading sci fi and getting interested in it. But I think I was always, personally, more interested in the sort of science fiction side of things, for sure.
SM: I feel like we’re kind of immediately diving into an in-the-weeds question, and I don't know what you might even know about this. But one of the things about Mass Effect, specifically, that I remember that made me go like, okay, these people paid attention and were, like, fans was I think the narrator—I might be wrong. But I believe, like, the narrator for the codex, like, all the lore, if I’m not mistaken, it’s the announcer that was also the announcer for the X-wing Nintendo 64 games. It sounds the same voice to me.
MW: Oh, really?
SM: And I was like, this is such a—this is, like—these are people who get it.
MW: [Inaudible 00:04:37] confirm it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if—yeah—if you’re right.
GN: I mean, I guess I kind of wanted to know which specific sci fi and even, like, which fantasy series and things were formative to you as a creative, coming up into this.
00:05:03
MS: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I mentioned Star Wars. Star Wars was huge. I think the other thing I’ll say—and I might be jumping ahead with another, you know, answer to another question—but I have always been fascinated, also, with the sort of kind of cycle that you see, where life imitates art. And then art imitates life. Right? And as much as I love Star Wars, I think, you know, I was a little young for it but, you know, aliens and things like that—Blade Runner as well. I also was fascinated by—like, I grew up in the space shuttle era as well. Right? So science, real science, often inspired me because—and it still does to this day. And I love meeting people who are in these various fields and talking about what they’re doing because, invariably, something comes up. And I’m just like, wow, we could do that today? We can do that now? And then I go, well, if we can do that, then couldn’t we do this? And, you know, that’s my imagination, now, taking it. You know, what if, what if, what if? But yeah. Certainly the ‘80s sort of space operas and sci fi—Star Trek to some degree. I wasn’t—I got more into that, I’d say, later, but that was something that I certainly enjoyed.
On the fantasy side—yeah—you know, I think some of the earliest books—I wasn’t actually, surprisingly, a Lord of the Rings person. It just kind of passed me by, but then there was the Shannara series, which is really just an updated version in some ways of Lord of the Rings. Right? And so those are some of the earlier books that I got into and was inspired by.
00:06:34
But I think, you know, personally, by the time I started in games, I was drawing from so many different references, you know, fiction and nonfiction alike.
GN: The Mass Effect series—did you have science advisors? Did you have any encounters while plotting out the series, where you had one of those—well, if we can do that now, then maybe—you know, how do we extrapolate that into the game?
MW: So we tried to bring in science advisors a few times, and we were successful. And but we didn’t engage with it as much as, maybe, I would have liked to because I’m a big fan of that. So for example, with Worlds Untold, with our first IP that we were building, I knew that that was something I was going to be doing. So I have talked to industrial architects, you know, future city planners, architects, things like that because we were building, like, a near-future sci fi world. And to me, it’s, one, you know, I’m a geek. I’m a nerd. I’m going to—I love what they’re going to tell me and what I’m going to learn from them. But also, you have to recognize you’re not experts at everything. Right? And again, with that idea of let’s see what the latest cutting edge is happening out there and look at that and then see how that can inspire us.
I’m trying to think. One of the things that kind of made the rounds a lot—and I don't know how serious it was, but you may remember this. There was this weird robot, where they were trying to emulate the larynx and something actually talking. But the actual visual of it was really something horribly haunting and terrible because there was no skin on it or anything. It was just this thing going [makes noises]. And we just looked at that. We sent that around quite a bit, and, you know, we talked a lot about what was the future of AI and robots and all these things that could mimic humans. But there was always things like that that would come up that we’d pass around, for sure.
00:08:27
SM: Kind of along those lines, you know, when you’re developing a science fiction world, there’s the chance to go, like, hard science, where you’re like, you know, there is no gravity in space and things like that and the chance to just, like, go wild with your imagination. When you look back on Mass Effect, what’s, like, one of the most hard science moments that you think about in building that world? And I’m also curious about just, like, the most completely fantastical, uprooted from reality in any way—that you’re like, yeah, we’re doing this anyway.
MW: Yeah. Well, I think, if you look at, you know, one of the core things, the FTL in our game, it actually is both of those things. Right? It is very grounded, I think, in science, but, you know, when we get to the physics of it, we’re making up a lot of stuff here. You know, you have to say, yep, there is a magical space dust called eezo that allows you to do things. We have access to infinite power, and of course, then you have the mass relays themselves, which we didn’t make. We just found them. Right? So it’s—and I think that’s really at the heart of what we tried to do with Mass Effect, which was we weren’t going to be hard sci fi. We were definitely a space opera, but the way I described it was it should always be a dotted line to reality. Right? So our future that we were building wanted to feel plausible, even if you would say, well, that’s not possible now. And that was always something that we tried to strive for.
00:09:59
So even when we would find something that was like, this is really out there, we would then try to go, okay, cool. We all love it. It’s a great idea, concept, what have you. How would you describe it with the science of our world. Right? And that’s sort of a constant thing that you have to do throughout, and it’s, I think, one of the things that made Mass Effect special in what it was.
SM: Yeah. I think, also, of, like, something like the Citadel, which, for listeners who don’t know, is like a hub in many ways in the game, this massive space station. And I also think of it as—I mean, it is fantastic. But it is—like, it looks right out of classic, like, ‘60s art of what people were imagining the future might be, real, serious scientists.
GN: Yeah, absolutely. It is very much, you know, kind of like a slightly opened-up O'Neill cylinder in a lot of ways, you know, the big concepts that Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill came up with for NASA in the 1970s, when they were thinking about, like, okay, how might we build cities in space, essentially.
MW: You know, I think one of the things I love about creating worlds—especially creating worlds in video games, AAA games that we do—is that you get so many different perspectives. Right? So a hundred percent, I know for sure that folks like Casey and probably Derek were referencing exactly what you’re talking about. Like, they were looking at these ‘60s sci fi and ‘70s and ‘80s sci fi but also actual what were people proposing at the time of that science as reference. And then you get people like me, who are coming at it from more of, like, okay, what’s a place where I can tell really cool stories. What kind of worldbuilding can I do on this incredible space station?
00:11:45
Likewise, you’d have, like, the head of design going, “Okay, well, great. You want to create a thing that’s got these, you know, 12-kilometer wards on it. I don't know how we make that fun game play. Right? So how are we going to—like, you bring all those perspectives together. And that’s where you get sort of the final thing that really comes to life and feels, in a way, again, like, plausible. Because we’ve all approached it, and to your point, we’ve all brought in our own references. Right? Like, so I’m thinking of things like the Death Star or things that I’m familiar with but, you know, where great stories are told on these sort of space stations. And that’s what I’m envisioning. And, you know, I’m sure, pulling in references from games and other sources.
And when you pull all of that together with that sort of amazing vision for what it actually became, you know, that’s when you get something so iconic but also, I think, something ownable. Right? In the end, as much as we reference all these other sources, it’s important that you also lead with vision and create something that you feel is going to be ownable and yours and, when you look at it, go, ah, Mass Effect.
SM: Yeah. And I think, in Mass Effect, you see that, even in things like alien design and alien culture and things like that. How much work did you do? I know this—huge projects. Like, how much work did you do in kind of, like, developing what an alien species might be or do or think?
00:13:10
MW: Oh, I mean that fell, often, a lot to the writers, especially on the sort of, like, coming up with an idea for, you know, what kind of world do they live on. What makes them unique? What makes their species unique? But I will say—and again, a thing that I love about game development is—it is a super-collaborative thing, where we get to—you know, I’ll write, say, a half page. The drell is a good example. So I drove a lot of the sort of creation of the drell in Mass Effect 2. I would write sort of a page, and then that would get passed to art. And art would be like, okay, well, this is what we’re thinking. Right? And they would do something, where I’m like, oh, my god, that’s even better than what I was thinking. Now, let’s go there. And in a lot of cases, you know, I’m thinking from an anthropological perspective and wanting to make them feel like they have their own society and something that’s believable. And art might be looking at it a little bit more from, you know, the actual biology and physiology of the characters and making sure that they’re going to feel and look real when they do that.
On the alien side, like, I still remember, to this day, Derek, the art director, he always had this giant katydid—I think it was a katydid—in a jar. And it looked like—if you looked at it and squinted, it’s like, that’s a Reaper. And that was the inspiration. Like, that insectoid sort of representation was a big part of what we wanted to have in those synthetic beings. Right? And so we often referenced bugs. But, you know, again it’s that combination of find something that inspires you, and then take it.
00:14:44
SM: One thing I find interesting—you mentioned the drell, specifically. For anyone who is listening doesn’t know, the drell are kind of lizard-ish but not, in some ways, kind of reptilian-ish. But one thing I found really interesting about that species—because some of them are pretty prominent—is it illustrated an example of an alien culture in science fiction that wasn’t a monolith. Forgive me. It has been a while since I’ve played, but I remember, like, one of the primary characters that you interact with has, like, a very specific set of ideals. And at some point, you meet his son, who has a very different set of ideals. And in a lot of popular science fiction, a lot of times, like, alien cultures are represented monolithically, which—you could get into all sorts of studies about what that tells us about humans and how they think of others. But yeah. So how did you look for ways to introduce that kind of nuance to add more depth to some of these species?
MW: That’s a fantastic question. I think what we tried to do—certainly, in Mass Effect 1 but, you know, every time we introduced, say, a new alien race or species—is you do want that sort of iconic person that you meet the first time to be someone who can represent the species that you’re meeting so you can learn about them, but not always, obviously. So a great example, I would say, is, like, Garrus, so and I wrote Garrus in Mass Effect 1. So in many ways, he does embody the spirit of the turians, but he’s also at odds with it because of his father and what his father wants and all this stuff. So we actually get to learn about what the turians believe because of all the conflict he’s having about what he believes. Right?
00:16:25
But ultimately, what you want to do is, you know, use those characters as—yes—teach you about, you know, a broader species and the culture that they have. But they have to be strong characters, first and foremost. Right? And obviously, if you kind of approach it from that, you know, monolithic perspective, I think you just start to run out of interesting material. And then what we would do, from a process standpoint, is it wouldn’t necessarily be, like, an owner of the drell. But there’d be kind of one person or two people who you’d go to and say, “Hey, I’m going to do this with this character, who’s a drell. You okay with that? Does that sort of jive with what we’re doing?” And a lot of times, that’s how we build out the lore because we’re like, you know, that’s a great idea. Change this slightly, but now, we’ve added to the lore. And we’ve created something new to it, and at the very least, we’ve created a new, interesting character that fits within, you know, the guiderails of what we’ve said for that species.
SM: Along those lines of, like, these kind of nuances, in a separate episode of this miniseries in the podcast about kind of space stations and things like that, we’ve taken a look at space as a diplomatic arena. And listeners, feel free to check out that episode, if you’re interested in space law and how countries use space as a diplomacy tool. But that is also a big part of Mass Effect. I mean, there’s a lot of alien species, all with different agendas, even within—like, one of the earliest things you encounter is that kind of the human ambassador to this alien—I don't know—confederacy—or alien UN, maybe, is a way to think about it—has a very different agenda, possibly, than you, as the character.
00:18:01
So I’m just curious about how you looked at kind of diplomacy. And did you see parallels between diplomacy in the story to, like, real world? Or did you think about things like space law and space diplomacy, as you were building out some of these storylines?
MW: Yeah. Well, yeah, I think, you know, science fiction is at its best when it does draw parallels to our real world. Right? You want something that feels like, oh, yeah, I’ve seen this happen on our world. But then you put a new spin on it, and you bring it along. And specifically, when we looked at, like, things like diplomacy and, you know, even just a lot of the political goings-on with the council and that group, for sure, we were referencing, you know, real-life events and/or, you know, just the things that we would expect to see here on Earth. Right? And we covered topics, like, from colonialism to eugenics and all of those things. And again, I don’t think—I, personally, don’t think that the rule of science fiction is to give you an answer to these questions that you would raise, but to actually just put the questions out for you and say, hey, we’re going to present this dilemma. We’re going to show you some sides, and we want you to actually think about it. I think that’s where science fiction can really excel.
And similarly, with diplomacy and how things are handled there, we weren’t trying to create an idealistic view of what it could be like. We wanted to show, like, you’re going to get people with their own agendas, and that’s going to be a complication. And how do you handle that? Of course, in an RPG, you get to decide some of how that’s handled.
00:19:41
SM: Do you think there’s something about fantasy—and if we kind of lump science fiction into fantasy, too—that makes it uniquely positioned to ask those kinds of questions, as opposed to other genres?
MW: I think so. I mean, to me—I’ll stick to my wheelhouse, which is science fiction—I think science fiction is about possibility. It’s about curiosity. But a lot of times, it’s asking the question of what if, and that’s not just, you know, what you could discover. It’s what would you do in a scenario. What would you do if this was happening? Right? And I think there is a great opportunity, when you’re already sort of peeling back those layers and offering, hey, we’re going to go a new world. You’re going to be introduced to a new species. You’re going to be put in a situation, all those trappings of science fiction. To then, also, layer in more personal or more social elements to it that also add that layer of—oh, yeah, that probably would happen here as well. Right? Like, it’s not all just going to be hugs and kisses when we find an alien species. What’s that going to be like? Right? Like, how do we actually find diplomacy? And trying to look at it through the lens of, you know, the challenges that humanity has already had, just trying to do that with ourselves, other humans, how much more exacerbated is that going to be when we find aliens or what have you? Right?
00:21:02
So I do think it is particularly well-situated for that. And it also—there’s a freeing nature to it as a player because we aren’t talking about real people. We’re not talking about real cultures, so it allows you to explore kind of all facets of that. Yeah.
GN: When it comes to science fiction and culture, I feel like the Normandy has earned a place as one of, like, the iconic sci fi spaceships. When I first played the original Mass Effect, the scene where you get the Normandy, the cinematic that happens there, like, I feel like that is one of the most iconic moments that I’ve ever experienced in a video game. I don't know what it was but just that design. But the Normandy, very obviously, is referencing the D-Day invasions, and I’m fascinated with how science fiction vehicles, as well as real-life vehicles, get their names. So how did the Normandy—the naming of the Normandy come about? And did you have, like, worldbuilding conventions for how the space navy, you know named their ships, that sort of thing?
MW: A hundred percent. So I’m going to get it wrong because it’s 20 years ago, but there was a hundred percent a convention for how we named our ships. And I remember—oh, boy, I can’t remember what it was. It was actually Preston, our lead designer, who wanted it, and he had a concept for how he wanted them to be done. And so we just started—you know, as a writing group, we started coming up with ideas for different ones. And that’s where the Normandy came from, but I wish I could remember. I hate that I can’t right now, but I bet you, if you did a quick ChatGPT, you could find out what are all the, you know, the ships, certainly, the alliance ships. And you’d very quickly come to what it was.
00:22:54
But internal consistency is super important. And so creating those kind of rules, even though they seem kind of, like, well, what’s—you know, you just call it whatever you want—I think adds to the believability of a fictional space. Because, oh, well, somebody thought of it, and therefore, the world feels more real. Right? Of course, they would have a convention for how they name. They wouldn’t just do it willy-nilly.
GN: It feels like, even if you have that convention, you have to get the right name, especially for your, sort of, your main vehicle. It’s like, you know, Star Trek with Enterprise and the Millennium Falcon. It’s just like they just fit the world so well. And even if you had established—like, were there any alternate names that were runners-up that you recall?
MW: So I was smiling as you said that because naming things is one of the hardest things to do. Because everyone’s got an opinion about what it should be, and ultimately, here’s the sort of gotcha with it. The name matters. You can certainly choose a bad name, I think, but there are so many good options. And they really become great or iconic when they’re brought with everything else. Like, if the ship looked different, and you weren’t as—you know, or that scene wasn’t as compelling, when you first had it, yeah, maybe the Normandy is now more forgettable. It’s all of those things wrapped together, and now, it feels like, of course, it’s the Normandy. How could it be anything else?
00:24:20
But since we were also talking about the Citadel, I’ll talk about that a little bit. So Citadel went through a stage. It was called the Star Citadel. It was called the Oculon [phonetic 00:24:31]. It had all these different names that we were trying to give it. And at some point—I don't know how long this lasted or how serious it was, but what we were naming it was also intended to be the name of the series itself. Right? Like, that’s how pivotal we felt it was, and then, you know, things chance as you go through it. But yeah. Almost everything, including, I think—I’m sure Shepard—all, anything you can think of that has a, you know, a proper noun to it probably had multiple iterations of them.
One of the tricks I’ve learned—and I was doing this recently as I was building a new IP from scratch—was, you know, certainly, when working with early development, it’s like give it a fake name, and move on. Because we will just spend days arguing the name, and it doesn’t matter now. It’ll matter later, and then we can spend the time to do it. But don’t get stalled early on, doing it. Because, oh, man, naming this is, like, everybody wants a buy in it.
GN: Yeah. We run into that here at the museum with exhibit titles, even.
MW: Sure.
GN: And we’ve adopted, you know, using code names, like the games industry often does for stuff early on, just for nothing else than to prevent a working title from becoming an actual title by default.
MW: Yep, a hundred percent.
00:25:49
SM: I remember when Geoff led a conversation. We recently replaced—just on the side of one of our buildings, there’s just a giant photo of a space scene. And there had been a picture there for years, and it was time for a new picture. And it was really interesting to just be part of the discussion of how we picked a new image and all the stuff that goes into what is the right message to convey there.
MW: Yep. And even when you get it right, you know, there’s always something to pick apart. I still laugh to this day. If you have a Normandy model with the SSV on it—right—we call it the SSV Normandy. The art director would come in the room, and he’d fly it in. And then he’d fly it upside down. And with our font, what does SSV become? Right? And he’d always be like, “How did we do this? What happened? Who greenlit this?”
GN: So I run tabletop role-playing games. And it’s like, if you come up with a villain, and your players will inevitably find a way to turn their name into a dirty joke or something.
MW: Yep, exactly. So but ultimately, I think you have to be rest assured that, if you make something great, the name will be associated with that and then, therefore, will be great, going forward.
00:27:04
MB: So going back to the Citadel a little bit, you know, this giant space station, what do you think real space architects, like, building the future of space today—what are some things that they might be able to learn from ideas in the Citadel and Mass Effect, in general?
MW: Yeah. I think that was an interesting question, and I don’t know about, specifically, anything in there. But I still remember being—so one of my favorite conferences that I used to go to was the Silicon Valley comic con, and I loved it. I don't know if you remember it back in the day. It was sort of 50 percent entertainment groups—you know, so games, TV, and stuff like that—and 50 percent science and research. Right? So it was, like, I am just so happy to be there because I get to meet all these people who are so incredible.
And they had this—I forget what it was called but this sort of meeting that I got invited to, where it’s like, we’re actually going to try to solve real-world problems here. And we’re going to do it by mixing together groups of science, and the people from the previous year were demonstrating something. It was essentially like a tricorder. Right? And they had been inspired by this—you know, obviously, the tricorder from Star Trek—to build something, a device that could, you know scan, get, you know, health information and data from a person. And to me, obviously, they weren’t replicating the tricorder. They were inspired by the idea of it.
00:28:31
And so my long answer to your question is I hope that, you know—similar to that sort of art imitating life, life imitating art—is that there are people who played Mass Effect, realized that there are so many people who are still inspired and curious about discovery about what’s up there, that that becomes, at least in some small way, the reason that they wanted to pursue something that they’re doing. And who knows what it is they’ll discover? It may be something that, you know—yes, it’s about creating space stations in the future. But who cares? Like, if that’s what inspired them, I’m excited by that. And I often—that’s, again, why I love that conference. I’d go, and I’d say, “Oh, my god, the stuff you’re doing, it’s incredible.” And they were like, “Well, you know the reason I got into this was because of Star Wars or Star Trek or whatever. Right? And hopefully, in the future, Mass Effect can be thrown in that. I’m sure it is already, today. Yeah.
GN: You know, that’s one of the interesting things about this moment in, like, real space, is that a lot of the folks who are developing the boom in the space industry right now grew up, you know, on video games and in the early days of the internet and things like that. And so you’re starting to see a lot more pop culture references percolating into real naming in the space industry than you used to back in the day, when NASA was the only game in town. And so I absolutely believe that. At some point, I would not be surprised if there was a Mass Effect—or at least a reference somewhere in some real space technology.
MW: Yeah. I’d love to see it, and maybe after this podcast, we’ll actually hear from a few people who are already doing that. That would be great.
00:30:21
SM: Yeah. I’m sure desks at Blue Origin and SpaceX are covered. There’s at least a few that are covered in Normandy models and N7 stickers.
GN: Yeah—folks with N7 windbreakers, you know.
SM: Another piece to kind of the cultural perception of space is that space exploration does mean a lot of things to different people. Like, some see it as a way to really push human achievement to new heights, you know, kind of this romanticizing of the space race era of, like, when everybody was working together, even though, even then, there was a lot of disagreement. And others just see it, flat out, as a waste of money. How did you explore these kinds of ideas of what space exploration means in the series or other ways that you kind of want to really represent the human side of exploration?
MW: Yeah. I think—I was trying to think about that question, and it’s hard to almost take it out of the context of today. But I was thinking back about, you know, 20-plus years ago, we were doing this. And I don't know if it was conscious to do it. But we certainly did kind of go past the sort of let’s talk about what should we and just get to it’s definitely a thing. We’re going to do it and talk about more what happens when we do and what are the implications of that. And, you know, again, obviously, today, I think it’s a different time than 20 years ago, and there’s different question being asked more frequently.
00:31:53
But I think a lot of the focus then was, again, I think, so what you’re talking about, which is focus on the human element of it. What does it mean if we are in space, if we are meeting, you know, other alien races, alien species, and what would it mean for the advancement of humankind? Right? Like, where do we actually go with that? Do we become better, overall? Are we still the same? And of course, at the center of—it was a human-sort-of-centric story because the protagonist was human. But at the center of it was also this sort of sense of human resilience, the fact that us, as humans, could do something that these other species weren’t able to achieve in past cycles with the Reapers and things like that, that we were going—that humanity was actually going to be the thing that sort of almost tipped us over and allowed us to actually solve the Reaper problem, going forward. And that was kind of at the heart of what we were doing, so it was maybe less of a space philosophy thing and more of a human philosophy thing.
SM: Yeah. For listeners who might not be familiar—spoiler alert—kind of one of the motifs in the story is that this group called the Reapers have, for millennia, kind of done this cycle of destruction that kind of clears out the universe in a way. And then it rebuilds, and then they come back. And yeah. And that’s—the story’s kind of set—You don’t really learn this until much later in the series, but, you know, the story’s kind of set at the end of one of these cycles.
And on the other hand, the main line Mass Effect series is very much—it’s funny because, like, Geoff talks about this all the time. Like, space is hard. It wants to kill you. It is difficult. How do we convince people to go up there? Or, like, that’s—how do companies or groups convince people that, like, this is a good idea? And yet, at the same time, Mass Effect is set in this world where it’s really not that hard. It’s not all that isolating, unlike, you know, today. It’ll take—if we were to put a settlement on Mars, for example, it’s going to take a long time for communication, let alone, you know, people and stuff.
00:33:58
But in something like Mass Effect, that all happens instantaneously, so there’s a sense of connection that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality. But in Andromeda, which is kind of a later story, that takes place—kind of the premise is this is a group that has left the galaxy. And they’re going to the Andromeda galaxy. So once—in a way that kind of reflects more the reality of space today, in that it is isolating, even if you’re with other people. How did you have to shift how you approached the story, when you went from kind of this connected universe to here’s a group of people who are—they are out on their own?
MW: Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of it comes back to sort of the core themes and things that we were trying to do, separately. So with the trilogy, it was meant to be—a trilogy is meant to be a space opera. We wanted to get you into the action—and here’s the milieu of everything in the galaxy—as soon as humanly possible. Because that was the story. That’s what we were doing. Right? Like, similar to Star Wars, you know, we don’t want to wait a long time before you get to be introduced to all this. And so, as part of that, I think one of the things we did intentionally was to create a sort of a normalicy (sic) around the fact that you’re talking to aliens. Like, nobody was walking up and going, “Oh, my god, you know, what? That’s a turian.” Right? Everyone was just used to it, and that’s part of the—sort of at the core of the trilogy.
00:35:25
Versus, with Andromeda, one of the themes was really getting back to exploration, discovery, and that sort of earlier sense of, like, we are going to the unknown. Right? We don’t know what we’re going to find, and because of that, it’s not that you’re going to, you know, not meet new aliens. You are, but every time you do, it’s going to be revelatory. Right? And there is—and in order to do that, we also need to sort of plausibly find a way to just kind of disconnect you from everything that you had known before to sort of put you out on the precipice and go, okay, there’s some risk here. What are we going to experience?
So a lot of it came back down to—I think, to me, you know, it was just about what is our core theme. What is it that we want it to do? And Andromeda was about exploration and discovery, almost a bit more of a Star Trek theme, you know, boldly going, to some degree.
SM: Talked a lot about NASA influences, but, you know, the dev team is Canadian. And I’m curious. Are there any, like, uniquely Canadian stories that are reflected in Mass Effect, either space stories or otherwise?
MW: Wow, that’s a great question. I mean, I was always trying to find ways to, you know, inject some Canadiana into it. You know [unintelligible 00:36:39] in the start of three is Vancouver. I believe some of the comics I wrote took place in Vancouver as well. So I was—for me, personally, these are almost more Easter egg. It was like I want to—like, why shouldn’t we be in it? You know, it’s the future. We—you know, Canada could be great at that time.
00:36:56
I’m trying to think of any—I don't know if there are any specific space stories or anything like that. But yeah. For me, it was just about, like, hey, don’t forget we’re here too. And yeah. And eventually, if you were to look—again, you know, 20 years, you forget a lot—but there’s probably a lot more Easter eggs than even I’m thinking of, as well, in there.
SM: I think saw, on the docking arm on Citadel, a little Canadian flag that said Canadarm, coming into—
MW: Oh, nice. No, you’re—
SM: No, I’m kidding.
MW: That would be great. We should have.
SM: In the years since Mass Effect came out, how do you see the real progression of space exploration, compared to the series? Are we on track to find those mass relays?
00:37:39
MW: So it’s interesting. You know, I grew up, obviously, imagining. It’s like, what would it be like to actually lift off and go and explore these places. And so fiction is the best place for that because we’re not there yet in the real world. And there’s been some, obviously, incredible advancements since, in those 20 years, like, since we started incepting that. But, you know, progress, as much as it sort of feels like it’s racing by us at times—technology and everything—things like space travel also seem to go so slowly, you know, the progress on it. And, you know, I am at the point now, as both a human but also a creator, where I’m, like, kind of getting sad that, you know, I’m probably never going to meet aliens. I’m probably never going to get the opportunity to even witness us landing, you know, on an extra-solar planet somewhere.
But here’s what I do find interesting about this—and this is going to deviate a little bit—is that there is, maybe, a way to sort of reshape the question and what we’re going to find out there, if we rethink some of the challenges ahead of us. Right? There’s all these—you know, you said space travel is hard, but we’re now in the quantum era. Right? And we’re seeing all of these amazing things happen. And to me, the mere theory that, you know, when you use a quantum computer, it’s essentially tearing a hole into the omniverse to go get its answer and then spit an answer back out to you means that—how far away are we from maybe finding aliens through a different way? Instead of out there, maybe we find them, you know, in an omniverse or something like that. Or perhaps, we find the answers—instead of going to Mars and finding an ancient alien civilization—like we did in Mass Effect that leapfrogs us ahead thousands of years of our technology and our ability as humans—maybe it’s in there that we find that. And, you know, we find another universe that’s like, oh, wow, they’ve solved a bunch of these problems. And, you know, all of a sudden, we leapfrog ourselves forward.
00:39:46
So I’m still hopeful that, somewhere out there, there are advancements that will, you know, get us further faster. And, you know, a lot of the storytelling I’m doing right now shifts more to that sort of viewpoint. And I think what’ll be interesting to see is, you know, how much more do we continue to see stories that are being told, like we’ve seen in the past, about—yep—you go to space, and you find aliens or what have you. Versus are there going to be new stories being told kind of in a different way? We’re already starting to see that. You know, I think quantum has become a thing, just even in Hollywood.
GN: One of the things that I think about—and a question for you, as a writer—how do you balance the, like, anxiety about wanting to be original? Because I feel like Mass Effect does a great job of building what feels like a very original set of, especially, alien races and alien species and things like that. But then also, there are those tried-and-true sci fi tropes. Like, you almost always have an insectoid alien group. You almost always have some sort of, like, robotic alien group. And I know—like, how do you balance, in your creative work, you know, when to embrace those tropes that appear in so many different forms of the media, versus the originality?
MW: Yeah. I mean, that balance is, honestly, I think, one of the most important balances for creating new IP, which is—and I always talk about it. It’s the original versus the relatable. Right? Because if you make something that’s just super original—no one’s ever seen it before, and there’s no touchpoints in there; it’s not relatable at all—it just kind of goes over people’s head. And they kind of go, “I was—I don’t understand what happened. What was I even looking at?” Versus the other way—it’s like, well, now, it just feels a little bit reductive. And yeah, I’ve obviously seen that before. So it is a challenge.
00:42:01
Again, a lot of it, for me, is about my own personal curiosity and those what-if statements. And it is a reason why I also love to be inspired by nonfiction, rather than fiction. So rather than looking at someone else’s what if, I want my own sort of thing, where I’m going to what if and do that. Honestly—you started off by saying as a writer—I think one of the best tools any write can have is a good editor or someone—it doesn’t have to actually be an editor, just someone who will give you honest feedback. And they will tell you. It’s like, boy, this is pretty tropey. Is that what you’re going for? Right? Because you’ll miss that. I mean, that’s the thing with tropes, especially, is that we write what we know. And part of what we know are those trope. They’re easy. They flow out of you very quickly because we’ve done them before. Right? And even, sometimes, when you think you’re being super original, you know, you’re not. And so having people who can feed back on that and provide a bit of context, I think, is super important.
But you know, the—I think, you know, when we try to create these worlds, and you find that sort of balance of original and relatable, ultimately, I think it’s, you know, we don’t just try to create all this science fiction that you can believe. I think the goal—and you know when you’ve got magic—is when people want to believe it. Right? I think that’s when you know you’ve got something special. Because they will then go, “I don’t care if this is a trope,” or “I don’t care if this doesn’t make sense; I want to believe this.” And you know you’re onto something, and that’s really special, when you can get that.
00:43:37
GN: Then we just need to figure out how to get the elevators in the Citadel to move faster.
MW: That’s right—Mass Effect Legendary Edition. We already did it. It’s awesome. Check it out.
SM: Is there anywhere in the Citadel that you would want to go visit and just post up for a little while and chill?
MW: I love this question. So it’s probably not the answer you’re looking for. But one of the things that, if I could do anything—this is probably super impractical, but I’d love, like, sit at the end of one of the wards, you know, feet dangling over the edge. Citadel’s behind me, and the nebula is out in front of me and just, you know, obviously, I assume, a space suit or something like that, you know, anchored, tethered, maybe. But that’s me, like, just staring out at the stars, staring out at what could be but also with all of this incredible behind you sort of thing. Like, to me, that would just be—you know, I’m also a person who likes to, you know, drive around in Waymos because there’s nobody else in there with me. And I could just—I’m immersed in technology, and I can go see the city that I’m in or something like that. But I don’t have to talk to anyone because, you know, I’m often—you know, I was an only child, growing up with my own thoughts. So I just want to be out there, you know, getting excited about what my next idea is.
00:44:49
SM: What stories are you excited to tell these days, Mac?
MW: I am still really fascinated with, you know, science fiction of any kind. And it is—you know, in my heart, I am an explorer, and so I love any story where we get to discover something and, ideally, discover it together for the first time. Like, to me, that’s at heart of anything. And then, of course, as part of that, I always try to—I always talk about you want the epic adventure, but you want the personal journey. Right? So at the center of most of the stories that I’m excited about telling, there still has to be some sort of personal element to it, where it’s still relatable, that people can just go, wow—yeah. You know, that’s what I look to do.
But we were working on—Worlds Untold was more near-future speculative fiction, I would call it, sci fi as well but more grounded. You know, it wasn’t a space opera. I was looking at doing something that was a little bit more closer to home and dealing with some of the things that we’ve got now and the what if of where would we find ourselves in, you know, several decades, as opposed to several centuries kind of thing. And I think there’s something every interesting in there—and just as a side note, I think, also, just trying to find ways to tell stories about a potential, hopeful future. Like, there’s a lot going on in the world right now, where it’s like people are maybe—you know, there’s always room for gritty, dark stuff. But I think, for me, telling stories where there’s a sense of hope, I think, is also important at this—
00:46:19
GN: Well, and it feels like we’re at an interesting place, when it comes to, like, sci fi and, particularly, space games. It feels like there’s a bit of a space game renaissance happening at the moment. You know, if you go through—and maybe it’s just because Steam is catering its algorithm to me about what it recommends, but I feel like, you know, there’s a lot of folks that are pursuing various aspects of space as a setting. Any thoughts as to what might be driving that, and—or am I just full of it?
MW: No. I think you’re a hundred percent right. I would—you know, obviously, the person who could tell you exactly why these things go in the cycles that they do could be a billionaire because, then, you could predict them. And you’d know exactly what’s going to trend next. But one of the things—and I don't know if anybody else does this, but I’ll out myself—is sometimes, I like to have, you know, evening chats with ChatGPT—or, you know, pick your model—just about interesting things just to spur my imagination. And one of the things I was trying to figure out was, if you think about a lot of that sort of ‘80s sci fi that came out, what was going on in the world at that time that caused that? Right? And are there similarities to now?
So there was a lot of distrust in government. Okay. You know, they had just come out of some sort of, you know, darker periods and things like that, and people wanted to think about hope and exploration again. So I’m curious. I don’t have an answer, but I am curious how much of our current cultural state and things that are going on is impacting that sort of desire to go back to sci fi. Or is it just something as mundane as, well, we didn’t do it for a while, and now, people are hungry for it? And everybody got the idea to do it at the same time, and now, we’re kind of hitting that point, where those things are all releasing. Either way, I’m pretty excited about it, to see all of this resurgence and renaissance that we’re—of sci fi. Because obviously, I’m a huge fan.
00:48:27
GN: Yeah. And I think you’re absolutely right. And with the exhibit that we had last year, Home Beyond Earth, one of the threads that we really pulled on and discovered was the way that space was—even actual plans for space reflected concerns and anxieties and needs of people here on Earth. You know, if you think about, like, when Wernher von Braun first proposed big, rotating space stations in Collier's magazine, it was the middle of the Cold War, and they were nuclear command and control. And then you look at, you know, ISS would—today grew out of post-Cold War fall of the Soviet Union and was very much about countries coming together to work together on big scientific endeavors. And now, it’s all about that Silicon Valley entrepreneurship in space, as we’re looking ahead to the future. So it’s interesting to see that reflection, not just in science fiction but also in space reality of what our sort of Earth-bound societies are thinking about.
MW: I think you mentioned it in another question, but, you know, there’s also, perhaps, a bit of, you know, a disillusionment around, if not the end goal, certainly, the way that we’re achieving them. Right? And, you know, the question rightly gets asked. It’s like, well, if we can send a person to Mars, can’t we feed people here on Earth or what have you? Right?
00:50:00
And I think those are all legitimate questions. But I think that, at the end of the day, I think humans, as a species, that we’re always going to be curious and always going to want to know what’s over the horizon. And in a world where it feels like—we haven’t, but it feels a lot like we’ve discovered everything there is to know about our world. You know, I think, more and more, we’re going to see an eye towards, you know, what’s out there or, you know, in the quantum world, what’s in there.
SM: Well, Mac Walters, thank you so much for your time and sharing your insight on kind of these inspirations and thoughts, big ideas—both historical, ethical—everything behind these expansive and, as Geoff said, iconic science fiction enterprises. Thank you so much for your time.
MW: Of course. And yeah. I enjoyed it. It’s a fantastic conversation, and—yeah—I hope it pulls, maybe, some interesting comments out of the woodwork after it’s out there.
00:51:01
SM: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. A transcript of this episode is available in the episode show notes, which you can find at museumofflight.org/podcast. The Flight Deck is made possible by the Museum of Flight’s donors, everyday people who are excited about sharing these sorts of stories. A special thanks to all of you for your support.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you downloaded us from. And please rate and review the show. It really helps get the word out. Until next time, this is your host, Sean Mobley, saying we’ll see you out there, folks.
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