A piece of video game history found its way online over the weekend: you can now read Casey Hudson’s pitch document for the original Mass Effect.
As spotted by GamesRadar, Mass Effect fan account Mass Effect News uploaded images of Hudson’s pitch with a short thread of features and characters that did and did not make it into the game.
Following the success of KOTOR, Casey Hudson first pitched his idea for a new sci-fi IP in September 2003. Here are some early concept and plot outlines for the project, which was to be centered around story progression, planetary exploration and online trading. #MassEffect pic.twitter.com/ONpykvNiyK
— Mass Effect News (@MassEffect_News) November 20, 2022
The Mass Effect pitch doc was written in 2003, when Hudson was fresh from the success of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. That the time, the project was called SFX. Much of what Hudson writes in the pitch doc is quite prescient, describing a series that would become a “must-have game for the Xbox 2 ” (aka the Xbox 360) and “a mainstream phenomenon”.
The pitch also goes into some detail about single- and multiplayer components, including cooperative play, describing systems like character switching that would become series mainstays. It also described “dazzling combat choreography and intense ranged combat,” which, as anyone that has played the original Mass Effect will tell you, was not quite what ultimately shipped. It was solid combat, but there certainly weren’t any balletic, sci-fi John Woo gunfights, let’s put it that way.
The thread goes on to share a number of screenshots and clips from the Mass Effect pitch and production, from SFX-era prototypes and early builds.
The new project, nicknamed SFX, was pitched around the concept that humanity, a newcomer to the galaxy, was engineered as a slave class of a creator race millenia ago. The protagonist would be able to explore the galaxy in search of Creator Artifacts using Jump Gates. pic.twitter.com/7l5VZrqNAX
— Mass Effect News (@MassEffect_News) November 20, 2022
The thread comes after the recent N7 Day drop, that left fans puzzling out a brand new Mass Effect 4 teaser.
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