Five days after Electronic Arts closed BioWare and cancelled the next Mass Effect, the fans trying to reverse it bought space in Times Square. The fan group We Are Mass Effect and content creator Kala Elizabeth booked the screen at 1560 Broadway in Duffy Square for all of October 26, a 15-second animation at 35 minutes past every hour. The screen is one that sells short slots to the public, and Elizabeth paid about $250 for the day.
The animation reads “Keelah Si’yah” above the #SaveMassEffect tag and a link to the group’s petition. It took two tries. The first version named BioWare and was flagged for copyright, so the group dropped the studio’s name and kept the phrase. “HOLD THE LINE!” the group posted alongside a photo of the screen. The Change.org petition, started on October 21, asks EA either to let another studio finish the game or to license the series out, and it passed 228,000 signatures on Monday evening.
The phrase on the screen belongs to the writer EA cut
The wording is not a typo for the quarian farewell “Keelah Se’lai,” and the person who noticed first was the one who wrote it. Catherynne M. Valente, the author of the novel Mass Effect: Annihilation who was co-writing the cancelled game, posted on Bluesky: “The closest I’ll ever get to being up in lights in Times Square. That phrase isn’t Keelah Se’Lai. It’s the Quarian phrase I created for Mass Effect Annihilation. The name of my ship. Not ‘by the homeworld I hope to see one day’ but ‘by the homeworld I hope to find one day.’ I have a lot of feelings…”
By the evening she had joined the campaign. In a post on the Mass Effect subreddit that drew more than 1,400 upvotes in a few hours, Valente wrote that she is “now one of the collaborators for @wearemasseffect, the group responsible for organising this billboard with KalaElizabeth,” and asked creators to spread the petition. “Like Shepard, we can’t go it alone,” she wrote.
More billboards are planned, and not everyone is impressed
Elizabeth has said the group plans to crowdfund further demonstrations, and the group’s Discord is discussing extending the Times Square run and adding other locations. EA has not responded to the petition or the billboard. The reaction outside the fandom was cooler: the thread on the general games subreddit was mostly people calling it misplaced energy, with several arguing the money and attention would do more good aimed at the laid-off BioWare staff than at an IP EA has already shown it was willing to walk away from.
The campaign’s counterargument is the number. A petition that gains more than 200,000 signatures in five days is the kind of thing a licensing conversation can start with, and the group is betting that a photo of Times Square travels further than a Change.org link.
Annihilation’s Author/ME Universe writer on the new billboard
byu/looploveslore inmasseffect
