The infinitely boring No Man’s Sky

By Tim Martin

Limitless discovery: that’s the dream that sold the video game “No Man’s Sky”, released earlier this month. In the infinite black of space hangs an unknown planet with an unpronounceable name – Zelovorcin Arcorr, Troyggdramniabl. You steer a virtual craft towards the surface, dodging asteroid belts and fellow spacefarers. You power into the atmosphere, the edges of the cockpit glowing pink and red with heat. Beneath you the planet spreads out in washes of colour like something from the cover of a science-fiction paperback, and a landscape shimmers into being: a waterworld studded with tiny islands, a mountain landscape of snowbound forests or a barren purple wasteland with rocks twisted into wormlike tubes. You land with a whine of thrusters and a hiss of hydraulics. A musical score begins its distant throb. You step out of the spaceship, into a new world.

During the three years of its development, the 15-person team behind “No Man’s Sky” (who work out of an office in Guildford) promised that they would use a technique called procedural generation to create a galaxy of 18 billion billion planets, each with its own lifeforms and ecosystems. Procedural generation uses algorithms to create automatically new parts of a game as you play it, as opposed to the entire game being defined in advance. This makes them potentially endless. In “No Man’s Sky” landscapes and weather conditions, caves and buildings, the size and behaviour of native livestock would be made for each planet you landed on. From the moment that its first trailer was shown at a trade show in 2013, the breadth of the game’s ambition prompted delirious excitement. There were profiles in Time magazine and the New Yorker for Sean Murray, its creator. Elon Musk, Stephen Colbert and Steven Spielberg phoned him up to chat. One of the executives at Sony, which struck a distribution deal for “No Man’s Sky”, described the game as “potentially one of the biggest in the history of our industry”.