No Man’s Sky

Loading

“When we started Hello Games, we actually had this conversation about the type of game we wanted to make,” says Sean Murray, co-founder of Hello Games and the man who has in last couple of years become the frontman for No Man’s Sky. “When I look back on it, we were so naive, so not knowledgeable about how the games industry worked. We left without a game idea.”

Hello Games was founded in July 2009 by Sean Murray, Grant Duncan, Ryan Doyle, and David Ream – all of whom had previously worked at a variety of British developers, including Criterion, Sumo, and Kuju.

Hello Games: David Ream, Sean Murray, Grant Duncan, and Ryan Doyle (left to right).

“We just talked about the type of games we wanted to do. I remember the conversations we had. If you want to be a soldier and shoot things, you know, you were really well-catered for. There are so many games out there for you. We were talking about things you wanted to be when you were a kid. […] There’s so many other things like a fireman or a cowboy or an astronaut or an archaeologist or a stuntman. […] All those other fantasies aren’t very well-catered for. So we’ll do things like that. As long as we don’t make a game where you’re a soldier, we’re fine – because other people do that very well.”

Even though the idea of being an astronaut was there from the very beginning, the exploits of a stuntman seemed more immediately within reach. Joe Danger debuted on PlayStation Network in Europe on June 9, 2010 – roughly 11 months after Hello Games was officially formed. Inspired by classic Nintendo and SEGA games, Joe Danger was a success, receiving positive reviews and popular attention. Joe’s daredevil antics spread to multiple platforms, a fully-fledged sequel – Joe Danger 2: The Movie (2012) – and two mobile incarnations, Joe Danger Touch (2013) and Joe Danger Infinity (2014).

Loading

The original Joe Danger was made by just four people. Being such a small team, everyone had to do everything – from publishing the game to whipping up publicity running up its release. (I still remember receiving emails from Sean regarding review code for Joe Danger Touch. They were very polite.) It was a satisfying, exciting, yet difficult period for the team.

“During Joe Danger we used to talk about this other game which we called ‘Project Skyscraper’. We kind of went through slightly difficult and dark times during Joe Danger, and this used to keep us going,” says Murray, with a smile on his face, as always.

Sean Murray promoting Joe Danger 2: The Movie.

Project Skyscraper, which would one day have 18 quintillion unmapped worlds, never felt oppressive to Sean; with its endless possibility, it became a necessary fantasy, a way to escape from the mundane pressures of self-publishing and start-up life. “We used to talk about the other things we were going to do. This idea – this Project Skyscraper idea – was so ambitious, silly, and aspirational it almost wasn’t real in our minds. But it was a thing you could talk about and get excited about no matter what else was going on, and almost think we won’t be doing Joe Danger forever.”

“ This idea – this Project Skyscraper idea – was so ambitious, silly, and aspirational it almost wasn’t real in our minds.

When you watch No Man’s Sky, even though it can appear overwhelming, there’s a definite sense of hope and optimism informing its universe. Maybe some of that feeling can be traced back to the manner in which the project was incubated: it always represented the next project, the game that could be anything.

“And then Joe Danger was pretty successful,” Murray says, with mixed feelings.

While every independent developer dreams of success, Murray realised early on that the success of Joe Danger would make it increasingly difficult to break away and start work on Skyscraper. In fact, the relative popularity of the series began to affect the way in which Murray perceived the work being done at the studio. “I just couldn’t get the same level of excitement when we’d started up Hello Games,” he admits freely. “That used to be really raw and exciting and crazy, you know? There was a certain risk there that I didn’t feel like was there anymore.”

The break room at Hello Games.

Murray’s obviously proud of what those games gave to the studio – in the corner of the room where we’re speaking, there’s a 6-foot cardboard cutout of Joe smiling, unaware of what we’re discussing – but at that time Murray was painfully conscious of the trajectory that was being plotted for the studio and for himself. He wanted to plot a new course.

“ it was a thing you could talk about and get excited about no matter what else was going on, and almost think we won’t be doing Joe Danger forever.”

“I think a lot of indie studios totally understandably go for similar-size games, and I could just see we could do another similar-size game to Joe Danger, probably in a similar genre, and people would be welcoming of it. And then it would just continue on, and we would do four sequels to that. And I’d be this old man with my list of silly cartoon characters that I’d had games about.”

Hearing Murray talk about this period, you can detect a sense of restlessness in his voice and body language. He should’ve been happy with the success of Joe Danger – it allowed Hello Games to grow the team up to 10 people, move into a slightly bigger office, buy new equipment, yet it had also made things a bit dull. Murray, and his fellow co-founders, suddenly became employers. Hello Games was in danger of becoming too serious and respectable. “We became a bit more grown up,” says Murray. “So we stopped talking about Project Skyscraper, because that felt like a weird thing to do – to hire people who wanted to work on Joe Danger and then say, ‘Imagine a game where…’ It also sounded very crazy to say aloud, so we just put that to one side.”

Joe Danger 2: The Movie at Gamescom, 2012.

But that idea – of hopping into a spaceship, punching through the atmosphere, and reaching the stars – wasn't going away. Jumping over a tank of sharks on a motorcycle wasn’t going to be the legacy of Hello Games.

“I had some sort of like… the equivalent of a mid-life crisis,” Murray says with a bit of a chuckle. “I really wanted to do something different. I had a real… I looked at what we’d done in the past, games I’d worked on at EA that had loads of sequels, and thought ‘Is this as good as I’ll ever make?’ […] ‘is this as big as I’ll ever work on? Is this the kind of sum total? Am I going to look back on this and be really happy? And is this, the start of Hello Games, going to be the most fun that it ever was, the most crazy, and everything now will just be a little bit more sane?’

“And that just didn’t appeal, so we started No Man’s Sky. Let’s make this project Skyscraper thing we’ve been talking about.”

On Page 2: we learn how the first line of No Man's Sky was written following an argument, and why it was necessary to make No Man's Sky in secret for so long.

Note: the three colour pictures on this page are reproduced with permission from Making Games Is Fun.