Why One Man Spent a Year and a Half Rewriting the End of a Video Game

Even by the standards of angry gamers screaming about things on the internet, the furor that BioWare's Mass Effect 3 started was a spectacle to behold. Longtime fans of the epic space opera, disappointed by its ending, started online protests, petitioned Amazon for refunds, and posted assiduously on the BioWare forums until the co-founder of BioWare himself issued a public apology and promised to introduce new extended endings "for those seeking further closure to their journey." They came out a few months after the initial uproar, and appeased few.

Still, that all unfolded in the spring and summer of 2012, so you'd think that even the most diehard Mass Effect fans have had more than enough time to lick their wounds and move onto the next game. At least, that's what I thought, until I received an email from a man named Gerry Pugliese yesterday claiming that he had recently completed a "rewrite" of Mass Effect 3.

"Call it a…blueprint for a better game, what Mass Effect 3 could have been," Pugliese wrote. "Mass Effect 3: Vindication is my attempt to vindicate—patch up, rework, and 'fix'—the final chapter of one of the greatest video game stories ever told."

When you write about video games for a living, you tend to get a lot of strange emails, so I was pretty skeptical. But when I opened up the text (available for download here and on Scribd here) that Pugliese sent over, I realized just how genuine he was.

Vindication isn't the inchoate screed of some angry nerd—though, by Pugliese's own admission, it draws some of its inspiration from that source material. It's a 539-page manuscript that proposes ten new possible endings to the game. It's packed with fully-fleshed dialogue, concept art from various artists, and well laid-out parameters for triggering epilogues covering a wide range of possible outcomes. Stunningly, Pugliese put it all together in his spare time during the last 18 months.

For the uninitiated, Mass Effect is a sci-fi game that casts players as a soldier named Commander Shepard as he or she embarks on a quest to save the galaxy from the reapers, a mysterious breed of aliens that look sort of like giant electronic squid monsters.

What many fans (myself included) loved about the game was the amount of control its creators handed over to players. Besides being stuck with Shepard, you could choose everything from Shepard's gender to the outcome of many a fraught moment of intergalactic political strife. It was like BioWare finally offered every Star Wars nerd keys to the galaxy, except without all the hyper-control over franchise branding that keeps a lot of Star Wars work from being remotely interesting.

What annoyed players like Pugliese then didn't have anything to do with the hundreds of hours that were packed into the three acts of the main trilogy. It was in the final few minutes of the entire saga, when (SPOILER ALERT) the fate of the entire Mass Effect universe was put into a few arbitrary boxes. Shepard is stranded on the top of a spaceship in the middle of space, and a spectral child tells the player that he or she must decide the fate of the universe by flipping a few different switches.

One of the most groundbreaking interactive narratives of recent memory suddenly seemed to be following the familiar script of many sci-fi clichés before it: Will your Commander Shepard join with the machines and kick off the singularity? Or will he or she press the kill switch that drives everybody back to the Stone Age? As many an angry YouTube video showed, the only real difference in many of these endings was the color of the death rays that showed up in the ensuing cinematic.

Pugliese said he had played through the Mass Effect series more than twenty times, and still wasn't satisfied.

"What made me insane was the ability to flip the ending," he told me over the phone. "You can come to a point of having lived your life a certain way, and then suddenly had all these options to be a different kind of Shepard."

Pugliese said that Mass Effect first seized him because of the sheer complexity of the web of human relationships in the game. He recalled a female character in the game came on to his Commander Shepard, and being blown away. And then suddenly all of his Shepards were given the same set of bizarre choices irrespective of all their personal contingencies. It wasn't just annoying, he said. It was unrealistic. If he had played his Shepard as a "badass," that Shepard should have "lived the ending of a badass" regardless of what button he decided to press.

"The control should almost be taken away from you," he said of the ending. "Like: right when your fate is about to be issued, you should not have the ability to change that."

I was one of the few people who liked the original ending, so I remain agnostic to the question of whether or not Pugliese "fixed" the ending. But whether or not I agree with him, I can't help but be moved by the guy's passion. I mean, he gave a year and a half of his life to the thing.

"I decided to do it in July of 2012," Pugliese said. "I literally put blinders on. By that fall, after work it was right to a local Starbucks to work for three hours. Or I would even wake up early to get to Starbucks at six so I could work for two hours before work, then go back again after. As for the weekend? I don't know what the weekend is anymore."

He was spending so much time writing Vindication that he barely had a free moment to actually play video games.

"When the anniversary for this thing came around in July, I said: 'Gerry you need to get your head examined," he recalled, laughing. "My mom kept wanting me to finish, she'd say: 'Do you think it's too long?' Which is Italian mother for, 'Holy crap you need to finish!'"

Now that it's finally out in the world, Pugliese isn't sure what the next step is. At 32, he still harbors a dream of working as a writer in the video game industry, and introduces the work in part as a plea for developers like BioWare to consider hiring him.

Whether or not Pugliese's plans pay off, his Vindication script is the logical conclusion to what playing a game like Mass Effect is like. The original creators promised their players an almost unlimited set of choices and narrative possibilities—something they obviously couldn't create. So Pugliese took that myth of player agency and turned it into real authorial agency. He might have been putting his fingers to a laptop keyboard instead of an Xbox controller, but he was still playing Mass Effect in his own unique way.

It wasn't what the Mass Effect writers had in mind, but it's the game he ultimately wanted.

"I'm a tenacious bastard," Pugliese said. "Obviously, I don't back down."