Somehow, No Man's Sky is 10 years old. I remember its launch like it was yesterday, walking across the street to Game Store™ from my then-place of work, the heels of my shoes threatening to melt into the gravel on another sweltering August in Phoenix afternoon, nonetheless determined to pick up the new space survival game everyone was talking about. It was a little barebones, but I loved the sense of vast loneliness and freedom of exploration. Today, it's like a whole different game, and if Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray has his way, it still has a long, interplanetary road ahead.
"If people keep playing it, I could work on this forever. I love it," Murray tells GamesRadar+. "You've got to understand, this was a game that when I was a kid, you could have asked me, and I would have been like, 'Yeah, that's a dream game. I would love that to exist'. So I feel very lucky from that point of view, and I would be happy working on this."
These days, Hello Games has an extremely passionate following thanks in large part to Murray's vision. There's a ton of anticipation for his studio's next game, the ambitious new open-world adventure Light No Fire, but even 10 years later, playing No Man's Sky feels like being part of a community, and that communal environment drives Murray to keep doing what he loves.
"It's very easy to get motivated to work on something when there's a whole bunch of people who are enjoying it. That's just a lovely feeling," he says. But even so, Hello Games is a team of dozens of developers contributing to the player-facing product, and Murray says the studio is at its best when everyone is passionate about what they're working on.
"We don't really have much of a management structure at Hello Games," he says, laughing. "So we don't really have the ability, even if we wanted to, to make people work on things they don't want to work on, so the studio, the way it's set up, it very much has to come from the people working on it. So as long as they're motivated, we're happy to keep making cool things, but it has to come from the team having ideas that they're excited about and things that they're excited about putting out there in the world. As long as that happens, we'll keep updating it."
It definitely sounds like Murray's heart is still very much in No Man's Sky even as development ramps up on Light No Fire, and he tells us the seemingly countless major updates released since the game's 2016 release haven't worn out the broader team at Hello Games, but he's a realistic person at the end of the day. "There probably is some end date [to No Man's Sky]," he admits.
"But if you had asked me five years ago, I would have thought we would have passed it by now, and it is a surprise to me. I remember finishing Voyagers last year, which did incredibly well for us in terms of highest player number since launch, and then turning around to the team, and I sort of expected them to say, 'Yeah, we're kind of done,' but instead they were just buzzing, because they've just shipped this thing. So many people are playing it, and excited, and they're like, 'okay, now we could add this and this and this and this.'"
There's no telling how long No Man's Sky will keep reaching out past the stars, and we'll probably get a clearer indication when Light No Fire launches (no release date yet), but unless you've been playing it full-time, every day, for 10 years, I'm sure there are still a few corners of its universe you've yet to explore.
