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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
