The game that makes you explore planets

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, 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. 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, 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.

He arrives at one of Sony’s cool private meeting rooms. Inside, Murray, with an apologetic press of a button, loads up the universe. As early as 1984, a computer game called Elite 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. 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, Murray claims. These worlds were created by algorithms.

Playing as an astronaut

In No Man’s Sky, you play as an astronaut. Every player will start his/her journey on an undiscovered planet; he/she will be the only person to have walked its surface. From there, you can board your ship and begin to tour the galaxy. The stars you see in the unfathomable distance aren’t a mere illusion, but real orbs. Travel in their direction for long enough and you can touch them.

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. There is biodiversity then, but in this game only relatively few planets sustain life. The conditions will need to be ideal.

Unlike many video games, No Man’s Sky will tick and function regardless of human interaction. 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. But it’s an optional objective. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that a player will roam for years and never meet another soul. 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. This remote existence had an impact that he carries, he says, through life. Murray’s interest in games blossomed into a career with the multinational video game publisher Electronic Arts. He formed Hello Games with three friends, 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. Hello Games’s first project, Joe Danger, explored the life of one such aspirational career of childhood: stuntman. The game was a major success but it also locked the developers into a cycle of sequel-making.

Birth of No Man’s Sky

One night, alone in the office, he began to program the big bang that would lead to No Man’s Sky’s universe. He wanted to evoke the imagined feeling of landing on a planet and being the first person to discover it. “In this era, in which footage of every game is recorded and uploaded, we wanted a game where, even if you watched every video, it still wouldn’t be spoiled for you,” he said.

Years later, the game’s scale remains vast. But now it is matched by the weight of expectation. In an industry that values bankable sequels made by teams of hundreds, this is a new name in a new genre made by an implausibly tiny team. In both 2014 and 2015, Sony made No Man’s Sky the centrepiece of its E3 press conferences. “People say to me: there’s never been a game that’s had this much hype and hasn’t disappointed everyone,” Murray said.  While showing the game to members of the enthusiastic press, Murray has fielded requests that they make it possible for players to create buildings, communicate with aliens or implement land vehicles into the game.

Murray is, at least in part, culpable for the gale of hype. Sony, offered Hello Games financial support. Murray turned down the funding, instead requesting a prime segment. Before he took to the stage at E3 2014 press conference, Murray was, according to a colleague, “catatonic” with fear. Murray introduced a video showing footage of the game. The response from the audience was ecstatic. 

The team is yet to announce a release date for No Man’s Sky, which will debut simultaneously on Sony’s PlayStation 4 and PC, probably next year, unlike most blockbuster video games. Murray, despite pressure from fans, has opted to wait. “The team is so small that it’s the way it has to work. For us, we’re building this game where unless all systems work in harmony, nothing really works at all.”

Two days after his appearance on stage at E3 last month, Murray began the private demonstration with Spielberg. For Spielberg, it is No Man’s Sky’s lack of a similarly focused goal that makes Hello Games’s project so interesting. Video game designers often seek to propel us through their worlds. But sometimes the worlds they create cause us to put down the to-do list. Perhaps the greatest appeal of No Man’s Sky is the way it provides us with the opportunity to make the unknown known.

Can virtual discovery match the thrill of real-world exploration? Perhaps not. But the imitation is nevertheless powerful and more accessible than the real thing. One of Murray’s friends writes science fiction novels. The writer conjures worlds from his imagination, a landscape of the future and the technology by which humans will interact with that place. No Man’s Sky is also involved in this long-running tradition, and yet the game represents its own futuristic miracles. Murray caught up with his author friend recently. “He bemoaned the fact that, these days, a lot of science seems quite normal,” he says. “Something he said has stayed with me: ‘It’s harder to be futuristic than ever before.”