Mass Effect fans put their protest on wheels on November 6, sending a mobile billboard truck to circle Electronic Arts’ headquarters in Redwood City, California, for four hours. The campaign’s demand is in its hashtag: #SaveMassEffect.
The run ended at 1 p.m. Pacific, the day before N7 Day, the November 7 celebration that fans of the sci-fi series have marked for years. This time there was no new game teaser to look forward to. EA shut BioWare, the studio behind the franchise, on October 21, and the planned Mass Effect: Universe went down with it.
Who paid for the truck
The truck was organized by Ariel Aguilar and Mer of the fan project We Are Mass Effect together with content creator Kala Elizabeth. Money came from a crowdfunding drive last month that was meant to cover billboards near EA’s offices and at December’s Game Awards. One of those ads has already run in New York’s Times Square.
Elizabeth announced the arrival on X: “Our first #SaveMassEffect mobile billboard is outside of EA HQ and EA Sports HQ in Redwood! Go get a picture! (do not go into EA if you do)”
We Are Mass Effect struck the same note, posting “WE ARE BACK ON THE STREETS” and asking anyone close by for photos, with a reminder: “Please don’t enter EA’s property.” An organizer said the driver planned to stay as close to the campus as possible without trespassing.
The location is not a random corner of California. EA’s head office sits in Redwood Shores, a district of Redwood City on the western edge of San Francisco Bay, built on reclaimed marshland. It is a business-park neighborhood, so a truck has limited places to go and plenty of reasons to keep looping.
The fight has reached Canada’s Parliament
The billboards are the loud part of the campaign. The formal part is on Canada’s House of Commons website, where e-petition e-7898 asks the federal government to give BioWare the capital to buy independence from EA, including its intellectual property, and carry on as a Canadian company. The petition was initiated by Brendan Routh of Burnaby, British Columbia, and is sponsored by New Democratic MP Don Davies.
It opened for signatures on November 4 and runs until March 4, 2027. When we read the official record on November 9, it showed 6,288 validated signatures.
That count works out to more than 1,200 signatures a day over its first five days. Ontario leads with 2,143, about 34% of the total, followed by British Columbia at 1,299 and Alberta at 1,218. Alberta, where BioWare was based in Edmonton, supplies a little over 19%, which means more than four out of every five signers live somewhere other than the studio’s home province.
A separate fan petition has passed 300,000 signatures, according to a report on the campaign. Any buyout would still need EA’s cooperation, since the publisher owns the studio and its characters.
The next stop on the group’s public calendar is the Game Awards in December, where fans have said they want another billboard. Canada’s e-petition stays open for another 115 days after today.
Further reading
Image: King of Hearts, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
