Sean Murray is sweating in an Uber cab as it lurches to the staccato rhythm of Los Angeles traffic. The 34-year-old video game programmer is anxious. His meeting at SpaceX with Elon Musk, the American business magnate who hopes to put a human on Mars within the next two decades, overran and Murray and two of his colleagues are perilously late for their next appointment. It is, if not the most important meeting of his life, then almost certainly the most notable (and this in a week of notable meetings; before Musk, Murray met the rapper Kanye West). In five minutes Murray and his colleague, David Ream, are due to show No Man’s Sky, the video game he and a dozen or so friends are creating half a world away in Guildford, to the film director Steven Spielberg.
Like Murray, Spielberg is in town for E3, the video game industry’s largest annual gathering, held in boiling LA each June, where publishers show off their forthcoming titles to baying crowds of fans. The cab pulls up at the Los Angeles Convention Centre, where the event takes place over three days. The building is draped in advertising for next year’s blockbuster titles. Murray exits the car with a slam and begins to weave through the crowd, clustered around screens and fingerprint-smeared controllers. He arrives at one of Sony’s cool private meeting rooms, just as Spielberg and his entourage arrive. Inside, Murray, with an apologetic press of a button, loads up the universe.
As early as 1984, a computer game called Elite, created by two Cambridge University students, David Braben and Ian Bell, allowed us to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy from the relative comfort of a desk chair. And yet No Man’s Sky is unprecedented. The game presents a traversable cosmos of unimaginable scale: 18 quintillion life-size planets by the studio’s latest count. Murray claims that, were you to visit the game’s virtual planets at a rate of one per second, our own sun would have died before you’d seen them all. These worlds were created, not by the hand of an artist or designer, but by algorithms. As in Minecraft, another gigantic video game world created by an improbably small team, every rock, flower, tree, creature and scene is generated rather than, as in most video games, drawn or shaped by hand.
The No Man’s Sky trailer released in Feb 2015.
In No Man’s Sky, you play as an astronaut, piloting the kind of nimble craft that once flew on the covers of Isaac Asimov paperbacks. Like those airbrushed visions of space travel, the game offers a curiously nostalgic vision of the future. Every player will start their journey on an undiscovered planet; they will be the only person to have walked its surface. From there, you can board your ship, take off, break the atmosphere and begin to tour the galaxy (all without the interruption of a loading screen). The stars you see in the unfathomable distance aren’t a mere illusion, like fairy lights studded into a black curtain of a stage backdrop, but real orbs. Travel in their direction for long enough and you can touch them. “We are attempting to do things that have never been done before,” Murray told me, last year, when the project had only just been made public. “No game has made it possible to fly down to a planet, and for it to be planet-sized, and feature life, ecology, lakes, caves, waterfalls, and canyons, then seamlessly fly up through the stratosphere and take to space again.”
While you might expect a universe created by mathematical rules rather than an artist’s eye and imagination to be bland and samey, No Man’s Sky boasts tremendous depth and variety. One planet is carpeted by bright orange tall grass, through which antelope-esque creatures plod. The trunks of tall palm trees reach upwards into a green sky, before exploding into a splay of crimson fronds. Another planet is wet with mist; only the tips of a few conifers manage to break the murk. There is biodiversity then, but in this game only relatively few planets sustain life. The conditions will, as with Earth, need to be ideal.
For example, there is a specific distance from a star at which it is likely there will be moisture. From this information the game decides that there will be rivers, lakes, erosion and weather, and every aspect (including the sky’s hue) is dependent on the type of liquid that forms the atmosphere. Many planets will be deserted, some entirely barren. As new places are discovered, information such as whether they’re toxic or radioactive, or whether they contain life, will be uploaded to the game’s servers along with the name of the player who made the discovery. These intrepid names will be forever associated with the location, like a space-bound Christopher Columbus.
Unlike many video games, which are rigged to respond only to inputs and otherwise rest dormant, like a musical instrument awaiting a player, No Man’s Sky will tick and function regardless of human interaction. Animals have daily routines that they follow. They might drink in the lowland lakes during the daytime before retreating to the hills to graze. Heavy freighters will plod through space to their own timetable, following trade routes and visiting planets where smaller ships will peel off to gather resources. As with the game’s terrains and atmospheres, all of this behaviour is based on mathematics: fractal patterns that are followed with clockwork reliability.
The overarching goal for players is to head toward the centre of the universe. This common destination will increase the chance that people will encounter one another on their journey (even if the game sells millions of copies, when your playground consists of 18 quintillion planets, a single encounter is statistically unlikely). But it’s an optional objective. “We don’t know whether people will congregate or disperse,” said Murray. “I know that people don’t like to be told that we don’t know what will happen in our game, but that’s what is exciting to us.” Indeed, it’s entirely possible that a player will roam for years and never meet another soul. Others may never leave their home planet, instead choosing to chart its terrain, month by month. While it will be possible for players to mine, trade or fight with others, No Man’s Sky will also accommodate the lone, nomadic wolf.
For Murray, this kind of solitary existence defined his early childhood. His “eccentric” family travelled a great deal when he was a child. He was born in Ireland but, from the age of four, lived on a million-acre farm in the Australian outback. The family was responsible for its own electricity, water and survival. The farm was a 400-mile drive on a dust track from the nearest main road. “We were completely cut off,” Murray said. This remote existence had an impact that he carries, he says, through life. For one, it seeded in Murray a fascination with the galaxy. “At night you could see the vastness of space,” he said. Later, when his parents bought him a computer, he’d play Elite as a way to explore stars similar to those that he’d watch outside his window.
Murray’s interest in games blossomed into a career with the multinational video game publisher Electronic Arts. He formed Hello Games with three friends, each of whom also worked at major studios, in 2009. When the team began to discuss what kind of game they would like to make, Murray returned to those formative memories under the stars. “Those emotions started to surface, the feelings you had as a child but which are rarely displayed in video games,” he said. “We talked about wanting to explore the vocations that we wanted to be when we were kids.”
Hello Games’s first project,Joe Danger, explored the life of one such aspirational career of childhood: stuntman. The game was a major success (it made its money back within an hour of release) but it also locked the developers into a cycle of sequel-making that Murray and the others had formed the company to escape.
“We went on to make four games in the series across seven platforms,” he said. “Each time you sit down to embark on a new project you start to run the calculations: will this be the next five, seven, 10 years of my life working on this game? It changes your mindset when a single game’s development represents a significant chunk of life. You end up thinking: how many games do I have left?”
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