Hello Games made No Man’s Sky with a very small team and launched it 10 years ago in 2016.
It’s wasn’t the smoothest of launches, but the tiny team that made it kept on improving it and making updates. Now tens of millions of people have played the action-adventure survival game, which lets you create custom spaceships and explore planets in an endless galaxy.
The game found its footing with fans with gameplay that revolved around exploration, survival, combat, and trading. It used procedural graphics to unveil a whole galaxy — an open world universe — to players.
CEO Sean Murray and a small team built the game in three years with help from Sony Interactive Entertainment. He was inspired by the optimism and exploration in science fiction literature and art from the 1970s and 1980s.
The game had bugs and launch as well as missing features, and it almost didn’t survive the backlash from fans who felt like it was overhyped. Hello Games shifted to a posture of touting features only when updates were ready. There are over 18 quintillion planets in the galaxy. Now the team is working on a second game, Light No Fire.
Here’s the full blog post from Murray.
Hello!
I feel surprisingly emotional today. Ten years ago, on 9th August 2016, travellers across the universe set foot on their first alien planet in No Man’s Sky.
Perhaps you were there ten years ago, or maybe you joined later. It’s very cool to me that all around the universe, other Travellers have woken up on countless other planets, light years apart from each other. They took their first steps on their first planet and brought a new unexplored universe into existence together.
Since then millions of players have made No Man’s Sky their home, created insane bases, built communities, made friends, and built really creative custom ships.
For any game to reach its ten-year milestone is impressive and I think that is especially true for No Man’s Sky. It’s really a testament to the passion of the team here and of the players for the game, that this year we’ve seen our highest player numbers since launch, and won a TGA and BAFTA for best evolving game.
Over the last decade, the No Man’s Sky players have joined us in another type of journey as we grew, expanded and deepened what No Man’s Sky could be. With now 40 major updates, all free, we have expanded our sandbox universe with base-building, exocraft, settlements, mechs, pets, living ships, expeditions and rebuilt the universe several times over. Support for Switch, XBox, VR, PSVR, Switch 2, PS5, XBX and more has been added along the way. In fact No Man’s Sky is supported on about as many platforms as there are team members!
It became a bit of a meme at the time, me holding up the gold master disc of No Man’s Sky but I’m proud to say that most of the people in that photo are still at Hello. The No Man’s Sky team has evolved over that period of course, but it is not really that much bigger.
Since then tens of millions of Travellers have spent hundreds of millions of hours exploring and sharing their discoveries and the universe is more vibrant now than it ever has been. Voyagers released last year saw more players than we’ve had since launch… and still, all these years later players have explored less than 1% of the planets in No Man’s Sky.
In a similar way our small team feels we have a lot left to explore in what No Man’s Sky can be. In the background we are busy cooking on our next game Light No Fire, and big things for the future of No Man’s Sky, with the tease of our upcoming update titled “COSMOS”. More will follow!
I consider myself exceedingly lucky to work with the people I do, on a game I love with one of the nicest communities in video games. If you’re reading this, then it is because you have shown us a kindness over that period. Big or small that helps Hello Games do what we do. For that I am truly grateful.
Thank you so much,
Sean