Mass Effect

Preproduction began in early 2004, just after the PC version of Knights of the Old Republic shipped, with that game's director, Casey Hudson, in charge. Around 130 people spent three and a half years on it, building space exploration, squad combat and "digital actor" systems on top of Unreal Engine 3, BioWare's largest programming job to that point, and because the game was conceived as chapter one of three, that technology was meant to make the sequels faster. Instead of a blank hero, players would be a defined character who made consequential choices.

Hudson wanted KOTOR's pseudo-turn-based combat turned into a real-time, over-the-shoulder shooter you could pause to give orders. The old space games Starflight and Star Control inspired the explorable galaxy, the Mako rover and planet surveys. Lead writer Drew Karpyshyn's team produced roughly 400,000 words and more than 20,000 lines of recorded dialogue, which he compared to twenty movies. Composer Jack Wall was asked to "marry the electronic instrument palette of the late 70's/early 80's with more organic elements."

It launched in North America on November 20, 2007. Critics loved the storytelling and the faces: Game Informer wrote that "you care about your crew," Official Xbox Magazine called it "a great science-fiction novel in videogame form," and GameSpot's Kevin VanOrd called it "a great game with moments of brilliance" held back by small obstacles, meaning the clumsy inventory, weak squad AI, the Mako's bouncing planets, and frame rate and loading pauses. It debuted sixth on the November sales chart at 473,000 copies, passed a million worldwide in under three weeks and 1.6 million by the sixth, and won Best RPG at the Spike Video Game Awards, Role-Playing Game of the Year from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, and The New York Times' Game of the Year.

Then came the romance subplot, whose cutscene has partial nudity. A Fox News segment hosted by Martha MacCallum had author Cooper Lawrence describe the game as teaching players to treat women as objects, and when games journalist Geoff Keighley asked whether she had played it, she said no. After watching someone play it for two and a half hours she retracted, saying she'd seen Lost episodes that were more explicit. Singapore banned the game briefly. Windows got it in May 2008, Mass Effect 2 imported your saves in January 2010, Mass Effect 3 closed the trilogy in 2012, and the Legendary Edition remastered all three in 2021.