Ah, like my true love, I still remember the day I first met Mass Effect. The countless hours of immersive game play that followed are, for the most part, something that intellectually and creatively shaped me into who and what I am today.

So, if you will, I’m going to share my story with what became one of, if not the most impactful video game series I’ve ever played.

So now, I’m gonna’ tell you a little story.

So to start, we need to look back in time to some point in 2007. At this point I was in my late teens, an avid 360 gamer and a general writer just writing stuff that took my fancy. Back in those days I didn’t have the internet but had access to it at my dads place, and with that in mind, I used to get pretty much all my gaming news from various gaming and Xbox magazines. And this is where it started, I can’t remember exactly which mag it was in, but I remember seeing an advertisement on the back page of one of them. This game called Mass Effect, which allowed you to traverse the galaxy, visit planets and countless star systems on your journey to save the galaxy. I’m not sure exactly what it was about it, but it interested me, it seemed cool even though i’d never really played an RPG game. It was probably about a month later or whatever when a magazine had a pre release look at the game, and by this point I was definitely interested. I tell you, I ate up that information they had on it at that point, seeing real in game screenshots, briefs on the various alien species in the games universe, that was it, I knew I wanted to play it at that point.

So it would have been the Christmas of 2007 when I first got the game, and I can still remember playing it. I knew nothing about the games lore or even exactly what was going on, but I played it anyway. The further I got through it, the more I got to grips with what was going on, the Citadel, Protheans, Reapers, Saren Arterius, an excinction cycle. I always thought one of the ending levels, where you’re in the mako driving through Ilos after Saren, when the Prothean VI, Vigil I think it was called, stops you and talks to you. To me, that scene was so cool, surreal, enchanting. But I went on to finish the game and boy, did I want to do another playthrough. Especially since I knew you could make choices that would affect the story arc, it was one of those where I hit new game as soon as I finished it the first time. It was through these subsequent playthroughs that I really fell in love with it, I used to love listening to and reading the codex entries and absorbing all that lore they put into it. Then at some point in the midst of all this I thought, “So this is science fiction eh? I want more, in fact, I want to write stuff like this.”

Now this moment was especially important for me because, up until then, I hadn’t been writing any particular genre. It was just a bit of this, a bit of that, but Mass Effect changed that. Suddenly it was science fiction, I loved Mass Effect and I wanted to create something just like it. And that gave me a focus that hitherto I hadn’t had. So before I started my own project, I decided I was going to read some science fiction to get a grip on how people tended to write it. A Space Odyssey, The Time Machine, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner), I went through all of them. Then, oh my god, I found out the lead writer for Mass Effect, Drew Karpyshyn, had done some Mass Effect novels to accompany the game. I simply had to read them. By the time I caught into these I believe the second book had been released as well so probably would have read them in tandem. So now after having read my all time favourite video games books, I was finally ready to start my own sci-fi story.

But before I go on, there is something else that Mass Effect gave me. At that point in my life, I was depressed, feeling useless, not suicidally depressed but looking back at it now, maybe just one bad day away from it. But I loved some of the characters in the game, some of them just random NPCs in the game. I loved their manor, their mentality, then I thought to myself, I want to be more like them. The game had all kinds of science in it, scientific and intellectual references I didn’t under stand. And this eventually lead to me wanting to educate myself and become a more intelligent, knowledgeable person. Next I was reading a deep encylopedia about the universe, physics, I studied electronics, motor engineering, increased my vocabulary and general knowledge, and this was something that endured for years, it became a part of me, who I was and who I’d become and still a mentality I carry with me now.

All of this was going on while I continued my project which drew heavily on what I believed made Mass Effect so good. I even went as far as writing a load of codex entries about the universe I’d created just like in Mass Effect. This project, who’s name eludes to at the moment, went on for probably a matter of years before I jumped it further into the future then further again to make it more like Mass Effect. Probably 2 or 3 years later I was still working on the story because I loved it, at this point I’d made significant changes to it so it kind of became a spiritual successor to what I originally started. But this was also a time when I had real difficulty sticking with my writing projects, something I feel a lot of writers have had. You write something for maybe a couple of weeks, then the drive just goes, don’t feel like doing anymore, then a couple of months later you feel like doing it again, but need to re-aquaint yourself with it all again. This is mostly the reason why this project was drawn out over years and ultimately never finished.

So now we skip forward a little further and oh my god, 2009 was the year Mass Effect 2 was announced. Because of the way the first game finished I knew there’d have to be a sequel and now we’d got it. When the game released in early 2010, wow that was a big deal for me. In fact I’m not even sure if I’ve ever been so hyped for a games release since then. I’d seen trailers and what not before hand and by the looks of it, it promised to be everything the first one was and more.

And I tell you, yes it was.

The copy of the game I got was a collectors edition that my step dad got me as a belated Christmas present since even he knew I was nuts about the game. I can still remember him visiting me at work and giving it to me, and holy shit was I all too ready to start playing. I went home that night and literally played through half the main quest, (probably 3-4 hours) before stopping myself because I felt I was going through it too quickly. And I tell you, that game was everything I’d dreamed of. It was like they used everything that made the first one good, then just wound it up to 1000. The development quality of the game was better, there were more locations and things to do, more characters. I could visit some of the locations that were mentioned in the books, it was literally a gaming orgasm.

This, after a healthy dose of several playthroughs, was enough to make me resurrect my story which I intended to somehow publish. It became my first ambitious project with an end goal. The story, which was now called Triple Science became my biggest and most ambitious work to date. As a writer, this was a significant step forward as the process of writing Triple Science acted as my formal education into creative writing. I can’t remember exactly how long it was, but I know it was well over 100k words and by far the longest thing i’d ever written and actually stuck with. This was an era where I overcame a significant amount of my writers difficulties. I was so focused on getting through the story, finishing it and getting it out there, that I just kept going on with it.

By the time I’d played Mass Effect 2, I knew by messages in the loading screen that there was a 3rd game planned and in 2012, we got that 3rd game. By this point I feel I was past my most immpresionable stage, but that’s not to say I wasn’t going nuts for the final game in the trilogy. At this point in my young life, I’d changed a great deal, I had effectively become that person I wanted to be largely due to the first 2 games and the effect they had on me (the Mass Effect), nah, that was a cringey one. But nevertheless 2012 saw the release of Mass Effect 3.

I was excited for the release of this game, no doubt about that, but at the same time, I knew it was the last one in the series. At this point, the Gears Of War trilogy had been concluded, and I kind of felt the same when that had come out. We’d been taken on this awesome adventure, but here we were, at the end of the road, the end of the story. In fact, I found Gears 3 so heart breaking I’ve still, even to this day only ever done 1 playthrough of it, gods truth.

But anyway, for me, Mass Effect 3 was the least impactful both intellectually and creatively, but that’s not to suggest that this is due to any fault with the game. Mass Effect 3 is just as strong as the previous titles in the series, offering more than either of its predecessors, especially if you include the DLC content. But Mass Effect 3 is the end of the series, and you can tell that when you play it. War has broken out, and you can really feel that this is what the previous 2 games have been leading up to. The main quest is a decent length. Enough at times, to make you forget the end is just over the horizon and…… wow this sounds like an actual review.

But I’ve played Mass Effect 3 through many times now and enjoyed it just as much as the former titles. But the only difference between this and the first 2, is me. I feel like the effect the first 2 had on me, was something that could have only happened at that point in my life, that I was in a certain place, a certain mindset at that point. And at the moment, no other games or any form of media have ever had such a huge effect on me, and I doubt it ever will, once in a lifetime.

The story, Triple Science, I grew to become increasingly dissatisfied with because the greater my skills as a writer became, the more flaws I saw in it. I ended up coming to the realisation that in order to make Triple Science what I really wanted, I’d have to literally start from scratch again, redo everything. You could say I may as well just write a new story altogether. I can’t really remember exactly when it was, but I eventually decided I wasn’t going to finish Triple Science and I was going to just start something new altogether. This eventually lead me to writing my first novel, Civil Eyes, which is on Amazon, (you can find it at the top of the page under books). Although Civil Eyes isn’t a science fiction, that book is an amalgamation of everything I learnt writing Triple Science.

I saw a video on Youtube about a guy explaining how the game Dark Souls, or I think it was actually Souls 2 helped him overcome suicidal depression. And I guess my story’s a little like that, with the exception I wasn’t “suicidally depressed” per say. It was a turn of events that only could have happened at that point in my life, almost as if that was what I needed at that time. And I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever been so immersed in a game as I have Mass Effect (although the Gears Of War series certainly comes close). So yeah, Mass Effect helped me, or it helped me help myself get out of a dark place at least.

So I guess my final thoughts on this are, if you’re of more of an old school mentality, or you simply don’t play video games, maybe video games aren’t quite as pointless as you may think. They can be living, breathing stories, with characters that can inspire their audience just as well as, if not better than books or even films.