Former BioWare producer reveals details on Mass Effect: Corsair, a cancelled Mass Effect game for DS

BioWare made one game for DS back in the day in the form of Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. It turns out that the company was also tinkering with an exclusive entry in the Mass Effect series, but the project was ultimately scrapped.

The same team behind Sonic Chronicles was also working on something called Mass Effect: Corsair. This would have been a Star Control-inspired game set in Batarian space that ran alongside the original trilogy.

Former BioWare producer Mark Darrah told MinnMax:

“So we actually had a little bit working. It was going to be a DS game. It was going to be like a first-person, you’d fly a ship. … it was going to be a combination of privateer and Star Control. So you would be independent. You’d be more like a Han Solo character, not a Spectre. You’d be flying around, picking up cargo, exploring, and you could explore and then sell that information back to that human alliance.

… Pretty much all we had was the beginnings of the flight controls – we didn’t really have the rest of that game put together. … The problem is that the economics of the Nintendo DS are just terrible. Sonic Chronicles was on the most-expensive cartridge that was available for that console. The cost of goods for that was like $10.50, and then those things retail for like $30, so $30 minus $10 – there’s only $20 left, and the retailer hasn’t even taken a cut. So it’s just like squeezing – which is why I think we saw a lot of… the cheapest cartridge that was available for the DS was like $3.50. So that’s a $7 difference, and that was the problem ultimately. We know how to make big games, not how to make games that had control of their cogs. It didn’t make sense. EA was predicting it was only going to sell like 50,000 copies, which I think was complete nonsense, but whatever, that was what they were predicting. So 50,000 times $20, this make $1 million? Maybe. And that’s assuming you made it for free.

Maybe it was Batarian space. There would have been combat in the ship. That was the plan. I’m pretty sure Casey (Hudson) would have gone for it since he loves Star Patrol – it’s his favorite game of all time. So I’m pretty sure we could have gotten him aboard. But yeah, it didn’t quite fit exactly into the IP because the way that FTL works in Mass Effect is a little different. I think we could have made it go, and I do think that the reality is you can usually massage an IP – if everyone is on board and excited, you can make it make sense.

… So what happened was, I went on to Devolver. This was right when we were starting up BioWare Montreal, so a bunch of that team actually ended up moving to Montreal… the team pivoted from DS to phones back in 2008, 2007 – whenever that was. And we didn’t really understand that space at all. Then it basically kind of got eaten, as many things did.”

You can see Darrah speaking about Mass Effect: Corsair in the video below.