Hello Games' Sean Murray lights the internet on fire with a single emoji that could mean more No Man's Sky, Light No Fire news, or nothing at all

Well, it was a nice, quiet Friday afternoon until Hello Games managing director Sean Murray decided to drop an Earth-shaped bomb onto the internet.

Say what you want about Murray, but he knows how to get people talking. That fact is provable due to the existence of a single tweet sent out today containing a solitary emoji. Fan reactions to Murray's tweet of an Earth emoji are bordering on the hysterical as fans clamor to decipher its meaning. Is it a clue that we're getting another No Man's Sky update? After all, there are planets in that game - a whole bunch of them, in fact - and the Earth is also a planet. 

It's just as likely that Murray is teasing news related to Hello Games' upcoming open-world survival RPG Light No Fire. We haven't seen a whole lot of that yet, and it still doesn't have a release date. And chiefly, a big hunk of its marketing so far has been its ambition to create a single planet at the scale of our own real-life Earth, which would explain the emoji.

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Whatever it is, Hello Games fans have come unglued.

"If this is another NMS update I will be very excited, if this is Light no Fire news, I may explode," reads one tweet in reaction.

Conversely, another fan wrote, "If this is another NMS update ima explode if it's light no fire i won't be as excited but im still interested."

"Light No Fire is supposed to be Earth sized," another fan rightly pointed out. "Is this regular NMS hijinx or something else."

And then there are a slew of unhinged reactions portrayed in GIF form, per tradition.

You get the picture.

In fairness, the theory that we're about to learn something potentially significant about Light No Fire doesn't strike me as pure hopium for the reason detailed above, and this being Hello Games' first new game in eight years, the extreme reaction isn't unwarranted. The ball's in your court Murray, don't let us down.

In the meantime, here are the best sci-fi games to play today.