Mass Effect fan group buys billboard in Times Square promoting petition to save series

"We are Mass Effect," the fan group behind a currently 224,000 signature Change.org petition seeking to secure the series' future, has rented out digital billboard space in New York's Times Square to promote the effort.

The group shared a video of the billboard in the wild on X, "The Everything App." Every hour at 35 minutes past the hour, the screen at 1560 Broadway shows a 15-second motion graphic message. Over a planetary vista reminiscent of Mass Effect 1's start screen, we get a distinctive N7 red stripe and the message "Keelah si'yah, #SaveMassEffect" in the series' go-to "Korataki" font. Yes, today is when I too learned that Mass Effect used a commercially-available font called "Korataki" for its logo and in-game text. I kinda want to write all my drafts in it now.

"Keelah si'yah" is a phrase from the Quarian language in the games. Continuing today's theme of new discoveries about a series I've spent, like, 1,000 hours playing over 20 years, I learned that this language is called "Khellish." The phrase means "by the homeworld I hope to find one day," not to be confused with "keelah se'lai" or "by the homeworld I hope to see one day." I was more familiar with the latter from the games.

When we checked in on #SaveMassEffect yesterday, it was still at 180,000 signatures, so pretty impressive momentum still. The petition's demands are fairly broad: A commitment of any kind by EA to continue the series in videogame form (not just the Amazon TV series still in development), either internally or by licensing to another party.

I know my ideal solution would be spinning off BioWare, either as an independent (potentially government-supported) concern, or by selling it to a new corporate owner. The studio's leaked trailer and reported vision for the canceled Mass Effect Universe struck me as both bold (600 years in the future but still tracking choices from the original trilogy) yet intriguingly specific (a galactic spy thriller). It reminds me of Joplin, the heist and intrigue-focused original pitch for Dragon Age 4 that was canceled in favor of Anthem.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the cost of a Times Square billboard activation like this. Plug Talk Media lists its single day, 15-second share price as $1,200-$3,500 as a frame of reference. A chunk of change, to be sure, but pretty doable split multiple ways.