Come in, Commander Shepard! As fans of Mass Effect will doubtless already know, today is N7 Day, the annual fandom-wide celebration of EA and Bioware's wildly popular sci-fi RPG series. And whilst we hadn't been expecting any major announcements from the far reaches of the Milky Way this year (the game devs have been quite busy with the release of another massive RPG, Dragon Age: The Veilguard), a pleasant surprise news drop for franchise fans — and lovers of sci-fi and/or peak TV more generally — has come along all the same. Per Variety's reporting, the long-rumoured Mass Effect show at Amazon is now officially in development, with Fast & Furious 9 scribe Daniel Casey attached to write and executive produce.
Focused on the interplanetary exploits of special forces soldier Commander Shepard, the Mass Effect games are set hundreds of years in the future at a time where humanity has discovered the key to faster-than-light travel. Boasting a vast array of alien species, biodiverse worlds, complex characters and even more complex storylines, it's a full-on space opera that feels like a natural fit for the big-budget adaptation treatment. As far back as 2010, attempts have been made to bring Shepard and co to our screens, with MonsterVerse maestros Legendary having at one point enlisted the services of I Am Legend's Mark Protosevich to pen a movie based on the first game. In 2021, after almost a decade of radio silence on the project, game director Mac Walters cited the constraints of a 90-120 minute movie as the reason a big-screen outing never came together, going on to suggest, "If you're going to tell a story that's as fleshed out as Mass Effect, TV is the way to do it. There's a natural way it fits well with episodic content." With the arrival of today's news, it appears Amazon were listening.
Now at this stage we don't know whether Casey's show will be a direct adaptation of the games' sprawling story or if it'll tell a new story of its own (the choice-based, dynamic storytelling of the games could lend itself well to a reimagining of some description), but we do know that Amazon is fast becoming a major player in the world of game-to-TV adaptations. Having already experienced success with the likes of Fallout and the newly released Like A Dragon: Yakuza, the streamer is already preparing to drop anthology series Secret Level next month, and has multiple Tomb Raider projects as well as an ambitious new God Of War TV series from For All Mankind's Ronald D. Moore in the pipeline. Taking that growing genre presence into account, the fact that Prime Video has still yet to fill The Expanse shaped hole in its programming, and the current boom in game-based films and shows, it looks like the Mass Effect adaptation we've been craving may finally be ready to take off. Watch this space!