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.”
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