Meet The Incredible Sci-Fi Novels That Inspired Some Of Your Favorite Video Games

Way back in the day, the original Mass Effect was my favorite video game. I played it more than a dozen times before Mass Effect 2 came out, eager to immerse myself in BioWare's slick new space opera and its cosmic mysteries. I was pretty young back then in 2007, still a college kid who wasn't old enough to legally drink alcohol, and a longtime Star Wars nerd dealing with how much I hated the prequel movies. Mass Effect hit the spot.

Cut to a couple decades later. I've just finished reading a series of novels, dubbed the Revelation Space series after the first book, by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds. In the early Aughts, Reynolds released a trilogy of these books along with a standalone side novel, a prequel novel, a pair of novellas, and a bunch of short stories. All of these works were set in his own original and extremely weird science-fiction universe that seems to have been extraordinarily influential on the games industry. Having now read them, it's difficult not to see the way that some of Reynolds' best and strangest ideas made their way into all sorts of games--Stellaris, Destiny, Dead Space, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect are some that immediately spring to mind.

I myself finally got around to reading these books because they are commonly accepted as inspiration for Mass Effect's Reapers. In Mass Effect, the Reapers are a race of ancient machines who periodically pop up to wipe out any galactic civilization that may have risen up. In Revelation Space, published in 2000, we instead have the Inhibitors, a race of ancient machines who periodically pop up to wipe out any galactic civilization that may have risen up. While sci-fi writers have always loved their ancient space civilizations, these are too specifically similar to ignore.

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