In 1961, members of M.I.T.’s Tech Model Railroad Club created Spacewar, one of the first video games that ran on the university’s hulking hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar PDP-1 mainframe computer. Spacewar, like so many of the video games that would follow, took place in the cosmos. The setting was, in part, a practical decision: it was far easier for the earliest computers to render the blank canvas of space than the comparable complexities of rocks, hills, or cities. But, for games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Defender, there’s more to the choice of space as a backdrop than utilitarian function. Space has always fascinated storytellers, and with the birth of the video game humans finally discovered a way to explore its farthest reaches from the crunchy comfort of terra firma.

Early games kept the stories simple, but it wasn’t long before these representations of space offered more than merely a place to defend humanity from an alien threat. Through video-game simulations, which have become ever more sophisticated with technology’s advance, we’ve begun to discover truths about our own galaxy. One of the first truly ambitious simulations of space was Elite, a spaceship game created in 1984 by two university undergraduates, one aged nineteen, the other twenty, working out of a cramped dormitory in Jesus College, Cambridge. In the game, players tour the universe in a dog-fighting mining vessel; the program employed vector math to create vast swathes of space, filled with line-art asteroids and spacecraft, which tilted and spun as if their blueprints had popped into three-dimensional life. Every time the game loaded, there was a digital equivalent of the Big Bang: unimaginable vastness was created from almost nothing.

“In the early nineteen-eighties, a typical home computer would have just thirty-two kilobytes of memory—less than a typical e-mail today,” David Braben, the programmer who created the game with Ian Bell, told me. Rather than manually plot star systems by typing the coördinates of stars and planets into a database, Braben tried using randomly generated numbers. This method reduced the amount of designer time required to birth a universe, but at a cost: every time the game was loaded, its suns, moons, planets, and stars would be in a new arrangement. To overcome the randomness problem, Braben used the Fibonacci sequence as a seed from which identical galaxies would be generated each time the game was played, all within a computer program a fraction of the size of a photograph taken with a mobile phone today.

Today, Braben has returned to the game of his youth for a sequel, Elite: Dangerous. This time, he used astronomy rather than the Fibonacci sequence to arrange his galaxy. “I wanted to make the galaxy as accurate as possible so that the results of that exploration would make sense to people,” Braben said. “In the game, every single star in the real night sky is present, some hundred and fifty thousand of them, and you can visit each one. Even the clouds of stars that make up the Milky Way are included: some four hundred billion stars, their planetary systems, and moons are present, all waiting to be explored.”

The positions of the stars were drawn from the numerous publically available sky surveys, which Braben and his team at Frontier, the Cambridge-based game developer, collated and merged. They used procedural models based on physics to fill in gaps where data was missing or incomplete. “As you move farther from Earth, the data becomes increasingly sketchy, but the galaxy still runs by the same rules,” Braben said. “The hundred and fifty thousand star systems are taken from real-world data. But once you move beyond a few hundred light years we can only see the very brightest stars individually, so we use procedural techniques to augment the data.”

Floor van Leeuwen helps run the Gaia satellite project, which aims to chart a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy. According to van Leeuwen, models of space such as those seen in Elite: Dangerous are crucial to expanding our understanding of the universe. “Computer simulations have played a very important role in astronomy for many decades,” he said. “The kind of problems encountered in astrophysics are almost always well outside what can be represented through simple clean equations.”

For Andrew Kuh, the human spaceflight and microgravity program manager at the U.K. Space Agency, the value of computer simulations has increased with data gathered by recent space missions. “This information is used to make models more accurate which, in turn, helps scope and define new missions to space,” he told me. “Of course, the ever-increasing power of computers is also a significant factor in improving computer simulations—but simulations will always need real data from somewhere as a starting point, and will require further observations to test their outcomes.”

Van Leeuwen believes that it’s in the disparity between real-world observations and computer simulations of space where advances are most readily made. “Astronomy is a field where you find a continuous exchange between new observations and modelling,” he said. “The conflicts that show up are generally due to simplifications made in the models, for which new observations can provide improved guidelines. There’s a continuously evolving and developing understanding of space, in which both models and observations play important roles.”

Elite: Dangerous has thrown up a number of conflicts between its model of the Milky Way and previous astronomical assumptions. “Our night sky is based on real data—it is not a hand-drawn backdrop as you might expect,” Braben said. “But the Milky Way and many of the stars around it are simply too bright and too uniform when compared to the real observable night sky.” Braben knew that the Milky Way appears somewhat dim when viewed from Earth because of obscuring space dust, but he was surprised by the quantity of dust and absorbent matter that the team needed to add to the game world in order to match the real-world perspective. “It appears as though our planet actually sits within that dust cloud, which is why the Milky Way appears so faint,” he said.

For Braben, it’s also interesting how the dust cloud causes the night sky to drastically change appearance when you move only a hundred light years or so out of the galactic plane. “At first, we see the familiar constellations begin to distort; some become unrecognizable quite quickly,” he said. “Once you travel a hundred light years or more perpendicular to the plane, those constellations are long gone, and the galactic center reveals itself more and more as your view emerges from the dust.”

Elite’s model has expanded Braben’s understanding of planet formation and distribution. Braben boasts that his games predicted extra-solar planets (“These were pretty close to those that have been since discovered, demonstrating that there is some validity in our algorithms”), and that the game’s use of current planet-formation theories has shown the sheer number of different systems that can exist according to the rules, everything from nebulous gas giants to theoretically habitable worlds.

There may not be any practical application for Braben’s game and its findings, but he nevertheless believes that it has significant value aside from science-fiction entertainment. “The dust-cloud theory only became apparent when all the stellar information was included in the simulation,” he said. “It shows that we can learn new things simply by looking at space holistically, rather than one element at a time.”

Elite: Dangerous collates a great deal of up-to-date astronomical information into one publically available simulation, but Braben believes its true importance lies not in the accuracy of the model or its predictions but in its value as a story about the universe in which we live, the flowering sense of awe that, contrary to most narratives, grows with understanding and familiarity, rather than diminishes. “If there is any practical application, then it is largely educational,” Braben said. “But, most important, the game creates a sense of wonder based on what is truly out there.”