Cancelled games are lost work, and a Mass Effect composer is rescoring one

When a novelist dies with a book half written, somebody edits the pages and a publisher prints them. When a film is abandoned, somebody makes a documentary about the abandoning. When a game is cancelled, the people who made it get a corporate statement and a quiet Friday.

I think that is a mistake of imagination, and a costly one. A cancelled game is not a failed product. It is a lost work, and it deserves to be mourned as one.

The peg is small and rather lovely. On October 28, Rock Paper Shotgun reported that Sam Hulick, a composer on the original Mass Effect trilogy, had begun rescoring the leaked trailer for Mass Effect: Universe, the cancelled game, with BioWare now closed ^[1]. The Daily Inference reported on October 23 that the genuine internal trailer had surfaced two days after EA shut BioWare's Edmonton studio.

Closure, in a composer's words

Hulick said he is doing it "for no reason other than closure" and plans to release it for N7 Day, the fans' annual celebration of the series, though he does not want to rush it ^[1]. He wants the new score to stand as his own "musical vision for MEU" ^[1].

Read that again. He gives no commercial reason and names no launch to time it to. A man who worked on the first Mass Effect games has lost the chance to go back, and he is doing the one thing within reach, which is to write the music anyway.

He is not alone. Austin Wintory, the composer, said he had been in serious conversations with BioWare and EA about scoring the next Mass Effect game, and he has now released about 20 minutes of exploratory music he made during those talks ^[2]. He called the series an "all-time dream project" and said learning of the cancellation and the studio's closure was a "deeply felt loss" ^[2].

Loss is the word he reached for. It is not in the industry's vocabulary. The industry says cancelled, shelved, sunset, restructured, and each of those words describes a line in a plan, never a thing somebody made.

What the other side gets right

The business case deserves a fair hearing. Companies cancel games constantly, mostly for reasons of money and timing that say nothing about quality. A company that has decided not to sell something may fairly decide not to show it either, and rights are rights.

It is not known what permissions, if any, a public release of Hulick's trailer needs.

Nor does any of this show that Mass Effect: Universe would have been good. Wintory is careful on the point. His music was an exploration, not a score built on known plot details, and his proposed approach would have built on the original game's score by Jack Wall and Hulick ^[2]. It came out of talks, not a confirmed commission. Hulick's rescoring is a plan, not yet a release.

And I am not arguing that every cancelled game should be finished, sold or dug up. Some work is rightly left in the drawer.

But notice what the business case leaves out. It treats the absence of a release as the whole truth about a project. The music is evidence to the contrary. It exists, people can hear it, and it says something about what a team was reaching for. That is true whether or not the game would have shipped well.

The archive is not enough

It would be wrong to say games have no culture of remembering what never came out. Games That Weren't, a volunteer archive that has been documenting cancelled projects since 1999, describes its mission as preserving cancelled and unreleased games, prototypes, assets and developer stories that might otherwise be lost ^[3].

Its range is the best argument I know against the idea that only polished things matter. Its current entries include a completed game that was never published and a prototype with nothing but basic movement and scrolling ^[3]. One is a finished object that missed its audience. The other is barely a sketch. Both are kept.

The trouble is who does the keeping. Volunteers rescue what happens to survive, and what survives depends on what assets exist and what creators are willing or able to share. A piece of music is easy to hand over. It fits in a folder and plays on anyone's laptop. I suspect that is part of why composers are the ones speaking up.

The rest of a game, the level layouts, the systems, the months of design arguments, does not travel so easily, and how much of that work its makers are free to discuss is not known.

So memory in this industry is uneven and accidental. The Mass Effect game gets a rescored trailer because its composers happen to have something to give and a fanbase to give it to. A less loved project, with less portable work, may get nothing at all.

What a funeral would look like

I do not mean black ribbons. A funeral is a way of saying that something was alive, that people spent years of their lives on it, and that its ending is worth marking properly. For a cancelled game, that could be modest.

It could mean letting the people who made it show some of their work, with context, when the company decides it can. It could mean handing material to archives such as Games That Weren't before it is lost, and not after. It could mean teams being credited for what they built, even when what they built never went on sale.

Novels and films have long had such customs, and they did not arrive because publishers were sentimental. They arrived because readers and viewers insisted that unfinished work still counts. Players can insist on the same.

The widening is plain. Studios close and projects die all the time, and each time a body of creative work can slip out of sight with no one deciding that it should. What Hulick and Wintory are doing for one game could be done, in some form, for many.

If you care about any of this, listen to Wintory's music, and when Hulick's trailer arrives, listen to that too. Notice how much of a game you can feel in a few minutes of sound.

A cancelled game has no shelf to sit on, so it will have to live in the ear.