The Legacy of ‘Scavengers Reign' Lives on Through Video Games

Gizmodo

3 days ago

It's been little over a year since Scavengers Reign was canceled. Co-created by animator-producers Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner, Scavengers Reign garnered a modest yet passionate fanbase and went on to earn an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Animated Program. Despite this, however, HBO Max—and by extension Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO Max's parent company—chose not to renew the show for a second season, effectively canceling the series.
Set in the distant future, the animated sci-fi drama followed the survivors of the Demeter 227, a damaged interstellar cargo ship stranded on Vesta, an uncharted alien world thriving with an mesmerizing ecosystem of exotic flora, sentient fauna, and symbiotically entwined wildlife. In order to rescue the remaining crewmembers preserved in cryostasis, the survivors must learn to navigate and ultimately live in communion with their strange new surroundings if they're to have any chance to survive.
Although short-lived, Scavengers Reign undeniably tapped into something deep and resonant among audiences and critics who embraced it. If decay is extant form of life, as the oft-quoted Tumblr meme goes, than Scavengers Reign's legacy nevertheless lives on in spite of its premature cancellation, spreading seeds in the wake of its apparent demise that have begun to yield unexpected fruit in the adjacent medium of video games.
'I think our whole team at this point has seen Scavengers Reign,' Brian Ostrander told io9. A designer and programmer who co-founded the San Francisco-based studio Manzanita Interactive, Ostrander is one of the creative leads behind Dandelion Void, an open-world survival horror sim set aboard the Pergola, a derelict generation ship drifting aimlessly through outer space. Players assume the role of a descendant of the ship's crew who must find a way live among the semi-sentient plant life that has overtaken the Pergola's interior.
While the game formally began production in April of 2023, shortly after Ostrander had been laid off from his full-time game development job, the roots of Dandelion Void go as far back as 2020, when he first read Brian Aldiss' novel Non-Stop, which chronicles follows the struggles of a crew of survivors aboard a generation ship who've descended into tribalism amid an alien infestation. Ostrander cites several other major points of inspiration behind the game's premise and mechanics, including Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus; Ursula K. Le Guin's novella Paradises Lost; Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora and Mars trilogy; and Harald Stümpke's The Snouters, widely regarded as the grandfather of all speculative evolution books. Buried in the heart of that teeming thicket of influences lies Scavengers Reign, dead but still dreaming.
'We took a lot of interest in the world of Scavengers Reign, mostly because it feels like the most original portrayal of a fictional ecosystem,' Ostrander says. 'A lot of times, when I'm reading science fiction about an alien world, I find that they really just focus on like one or two creatures, and it's not always apparent how they fit into the world they live in. It's almost like medieval dragons; like, what is the medieval dragon's purpose in the ecosystem? You know, medieval writers didn't concern themselves with that, because that's not the angle they're coming from. That's fine, and a lot of sci-fi authors do that too, but Scavengers Reign, it's like each episode has this new, unique creature that makes sense in the biome it's living in. And you don't see that a lot in sci-fi, and I just can't imagine how much work it was to come up with so many original characters or creature designs.'
Scavenger Reign's influence can be seen and felt through yet another piece of interactive media: the latest expansion for Destiny 2, which was released on consoles and PC earlier this month. Set in an heretofore unexplored region of the universe, Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate takes players both new and old to Kepler, a planetoid suspended in the orbit of a black hole on the rim of Earth's solar system. After receiving an 'invitation' from a cohort of fourth-dimensional beings known as 'the Nine,' players must traverse Kepler in order to unearth its many secrets as they infer the significance of the Nine and their grand cosmic designs.
'We started development almost a year ago,' Alison Lührs, narrative director for Destiny 2, told io9. 'We began in June of last year, and when Robbie [Stevens, assistant game director] and I talked about what our goals were and what we really wanted to do, at least narratively, we wanted to wake our fans up. Something we thought about a lot is how do we get the speculation engine going again of what is the mystery inside of Destiny. And so we had this goal of: how do we have The Edge of Fate kick off the saga, but ultimately pose more questions than it answers, because we want the mystery to be back in Destiny.'
In crafting the alien yet familiar terrain of Kepler, with its amethyst dunescapes dotted with the detritus of crashed colony ships overgrown with extraterrestrial fungi, the team at Bungie pulled inspiration from a host of influences, among them games like Metroid 2 and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, but also non-game influences including progressive rock, psychedelic jazz, the paintings of Mark Rothko, and the 'New Weird' subgenre of literature, film, and television. During the early pre-production phase of The Edge of Fate, Scavengers Reign popped up on Bungie's radar and left a lasting impression on the team.
'When we were looking at referential material, Scavengers Reign had probably come out, I don't know, like six months before we really got like, knees deep really into the creative process of The Edge of Fate,' Stevens told io9. 'We were staring at that and going like, 'Oh my gosh, the visual design of this world and these stories is so compelling,' especially with how the characters interact with this strange world and how some literally fuse themselves with these environments.'
It was this aspect of Scavengers Reign, the symbiosis between organic and inorganic matter, that inspired Matterspark, a new ability in The Edge of Fate that allows players to fuse with dark matter, transforming themselves into a spherical bundle of thrumming energy. Apart from this, however, it was ultimately another aspect of the show that struck home for Bungie while creating The Edge of Fate.
'[One of the things] that Scavengers Reign really triumphs at is the world building itself, creating a place that is so alien and also inviting at the same time, while also finding the places where the human body intersects with the strange environment around them,' Lührs says. 'Obviously, that was a big influence on us. But, more importantly, is the sense of humanity and the connection of the characters themselves, making sure that no matter how wackadoodle this planet gets, that they still had really, really grounded character work inside of it, so that the audience gets to come along on the journey instead of feeling alienated by it. That was something that we held as a principle as we were working on The Edge of Fate.'
During our interview Stevens mentioned that, prior to going heads-down in the final stretch of The Edge of Fate's production, he had been reading Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, as well as This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
'It really takes you on a journey that, by the time you get to the end, it feels like you get so much out of it by the end of it.' Stevens told io9. 'I'm getting emotional right now, because of the thing about those characters and the relationship they form with each other.' By a stroke of kismet, the third and final developer I spoke to about Scavengers Reign's lasting influence also cited El-Mothar and Gladstone's novel at the top of their recent reading list.
'In the book club we're doing on our Discord, we're doing This Is How You Lose the Time War,' Joel Burgess, co-founder and head of Soft Rains, told io9. 'I read it like, half of a year ago and then, just like, fell off. So it's been a good excuse for me to go back and dive in so I can finish it this time.' Based in Toronto, the studio—named after Sara Teasdale's 1918 poem 'There Will Come Soft Rains,' which inspired Ray Bradbury's 1950 short story of the same name—has been working on their debut title, Ambrosia Sky, as early as 2022.
Set in the 23rd century, the game centers on Dalia, a deep space disaster specialist working on behalf of the 'Scarabs,' a clandestine sect of field scientists pursuing a 'cure' for death, colloquially referred to as the 'Ambrosia' project. After an unknown disaster strikes an agricultural colony in the rings of Saturn, Dalia—a former inhabitant of the colony—is dispatched to investigate, exhume the remains of the dead, and retrieve anomalous biological samples for future study.
'In the early days of Ambrosia Sky, we thought a lot about, if we do have this agricultural setting, what type of characters and what type of character interactions are really interesting here,' Ambrosia Sky narrative director Kaitlin Tremblay told io9. 'I didn't want to go like, 'She's a farmer in a farm colony.' Like, what's a different perspective, and this is how we got to our sci-fi job of a death cleaner. Scarabs are the sci-fi blend of real world death cleaners, or bio cleaners; people who come in to clean up spaces after people have died. We wanted to blend that with a little bit of the mythological and fantastical sci-fi that we have, and so we gave them this greater creed about pursuing immortality. And this is why they go around the cosmos looking at death and understanding death in order to try to understand how our bodies react to the environmental factors that we find in the cosmos.'
Ambrosia Sky's influences are as eclectic as its gameplay, with Tremblay citing the works of Andy Weir, Beck Chambers, and Jeff VanderMeer as prominent inspirations behind the game's initial premise, characters, and tone, as well as anti-aging research like Nicklas Brendborg's Jellyfish Age Backwards. 'Annihilation was such a big thing for us in the way it looks at the kind of symbiosis between humanity and our ecosystems, and the ways those things can influence each other,' Tremblay says. 'And then combining that with the kind of really character-forward, quiet coziness of Becky Chambers' work that's really introspective and that really kind of digs down deep into these everyday feelings that you have in these great lush settings. So it was really kind of combining a lot of those types of influences along with a lot of my own past work or other things that I'm deeply interested in.'
In addition, Burgess also cited Grim Wilkins' Prophet reboot for Image Comics, along with Robert MacFarlane's 2019 non-fiction book Underland: A Deep Time Journey.
'Mushrooms are having a bit of a moment in the discourse,' Burgess says. 'Mushrooms, fungi, mycelium, et cetera. They're just like a bit more of a household topic now, and I think it's tied up in stuff like, y'know, alternative food and clothing sources. Mycelium is fascinating in general. But then when we start thinking about death, death and space, and what would that mean; How would you deal with it, what kind of character would [interact with death in space regularly]? There's just like this harmony of how we think about decay and rot and mushrooms and fungi, and like, the ick factor of all that. But also, that's such an important and sort of cryptic, hard to understand part of life on our own planet.'
While Ambrosia Sky was already well into production before Scavengers Reign first premiere, the show's aesthetic, premise, and themes still emboldened Soft Rain's belief that it had tapped into something that was real and resonant within the zeitgeist. 'We love Scavengers Reign,' Tremblay says. 'I adore that show. I think it's brilliant, and I think it does a lot of really interesting things like, creature ecosystem and worldbuilding. One thing for me, and this already existed for us [with Ambrosia Sky], so I think it was more a validation that we were hitting on an idea that other people were interested in and there was ground there, was the way they made a lot of their grotesque stuff really beautiful. Like, there's a lot of really gross, gory deaths in Scavengers Reign that are actually quite aesthetically appealing and mesmerizing. And I think that was something that kind of sat next to what we were doing with Ambrosia Sky as well. The idea wasn't new from Scavengers Reign to us, but it was affirming and validating.'
'I think Scavengers Reign really, really nails something a lot of sci-fi takes for granted, [in that] it's alien in a way that feels, with time, it would be understandable.' Burgess told io9. 'Like, there is a cohesion that gives credibility to what I'm seeing as completely alien. It doesn't make sense, but if I lived here long enough and I studied it hard enough, it might make sense. And they show that in the run of the story as well, like you can understand it, right? Sort of the, you know, the corollary and fantasy of, you know, like magic has to follow rules if you're writing a fantasy thing, right? It feels like that's something that's something a Scavengers Reign gets right in a big way.'
Since news of Scavengers Reign's cancellation first broke, the future of the series has been in a state of suspended animation, pun half-intended. Co-creator Joseph Bennett took to Instagram last November to announce that Netflix had passed on greenlighting a second season following the series' arrival on the streaming service, in addition to sharing a teaser trailer for what a second season would look like.
'This is not the end,' Bennett wrote. 'There is more story to be told, we are ready to make another season, and we produced in-house at Green Street a teaser for what was going to come in the second season.' While the future of Scavengers Reign remains in flux, its legacy nonetheless endures through the imaginations and artwork of audiences and artists alike. Big things have small beginnings, and while decay and deterioration might be an inexorable fact of the universe, there's still nothing quite so powerful as an idea whose time has finally come.
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