When designing any game, there are some characters that make the cut and some that don’t. For a universe as expansive as Mass Effect, it makes sense that some of the original character ideas ended up on the cutting room floor or getting reworked into the characters players know (and maybe love, maybe hate) today. Mass Effect 2 had 12 total companions, and recently a new video has surfaced explaining all the cut characters from the trilogy’s second entry.
Among these characters included concepts that would later become Garrus Vakarian (the Archangel) as well as bits and pieces showing up in Jack and Zaeed Massani. Others were cut entirely but definitely would have been interesting companions aboard the Normandy. One of the cut characters was “The Techno-hippie,” who would have been a 45-year-old male salarian who was both an intergalactic stoner and incredible hacker. This concept would have been hilarious to see in the game, but at the same time it’s a bit difficult to imagine a stoner character in the middle of the Reaper War and gearing up for Mass Effect 2’s Suicide Mission with so much at stake.
As demonstrated in the Mass Effect games, salarians are incredibly intelligent but also have a darker, manipulative streak to them. The salarians and the asari were actually the first two alien races to make it to the Citadel and create the Citadel Council, meaning they were among the first aliens to discover travel by mass relay. However, activating a certain mass relay also led to the rachni, an alien race that gave the Council a headache and a half.
To combat against the rachni, the salarians provided the krogan with technology and resources on a new homeworld that they could actually thrive on and not just survive. This was all well and good until the rachni were eliminated and the krogan became more powerful than many other alien races in the Milky Way. That’s when salarian scientists decided to develop the genophage so krogan could stop reproducing so rapidly and outnumbering other alien races.
The biological warfare put an end to the Krogan Rebellions, but some salarians, like Mordin Solus, lived to regret their work on the genophage. Salarians are both highly intelligent and manipulative, so introducing the Techno-hippie would have made sense based on his intellect, but it’s still difficult to picture a space-age stoner as a functioning (or nearly-functioning) member of Shepard’s team in Mass Effect 2.
According to the document that BioWare’s Mac Walters recounts and explains, the Techno-hippie would have been introduced as an “anarchist hacker” that Shepard is trying to find before government agents do. He would have been an isolationist, so Shepard would have had to travel to the very edges of the galaxy to find him living among “the space age equivalent of pot-heads and flower children.”
The Techno-hippie would have been heavily inspired by Tommy Chong but also one of the best hackers and programmers in the galaxy. He would have been easy-going to a fault, with a pretty bad memory. It’s not hard to envision a character like this, but it definitely would have been strange to see it played out by a salarian. Most salarians are fast, focused, and pretty far from the stoner stereotype, so it may have broken the immersion of the Mass Effect universe if the Techno-hippie had made an appearance.
Rest assured though, the Techno-hippie would also have been absolutely delightful to play with and interact with, so in that regard it’s definitely a shame he didn’t make it into the final cut of Mass Effect 2. Though players cannot play with the Techno-hippie, Mass Effect Legendary Edition’s release will allow them to interact with their favorite of the 12 companions again in the remastered version of Mass Effect 2.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition will be available May 14 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
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