When Hello Games ended its trailer for No Man’s Sky‘s first major update with three little words – “Our journey continues” – it’s doubtful anyone, studio included, could have predicted the game would still be going strong some 10 years later. But as the exploratory space sim celebrates a decade since its original release this week, it’s now stronger than ever. It’s been an eventful 10 years, seeing the release of over 45 major updates, and so to mark No Man’s Sky’s huge milestone I chatted with studio boss Sean Murray about that 10-year (and counting) journey, the past, the future, and even the origin of those emojis.
“It’s been an amazing year”, an incredibly upbeat Murray tells me over a video call when I ask if No Man’s Sky’s 10th anniversary has properly sunk in yet. “And last year we hit our highest player number since launch with Voyagers. And we won the BAFTA, the TGA, the Develop Award, and a whole bunch of awards … It’s kind of crazy, right? But the flip side of that, it’s just the same as any other day for me and the team. We’re very stoic like that. Day to day, we’re coming in and we’re thinking about the next thing. And we’re working on another big update for No Man’s Sky. I think the community will be like, ‘Oh my god, this is a big moment!’, but for us, without sounding too pretentious, it’s just another step on a journey.”
For Murray, of course, it’s been an even longer journey. “I’ve worked on No Man’s Sky for maybe 15, 16 years. So that’s half a lifetime, he tells me, recalling the exact moment No Man’s Sky began to take shape. “We were in a bit of an argument with one of the platform holders, and we were trying to release I think Joe Danger 2,” he explains. “And we were sort of battling back and forth, trying to get them to just put the game on the store, which you really had to beg for at the time … And it was killing me, it was really wearing me down. And I remember this platform holder, they wanted a call, and they set it for 6am UK time. So I was going to have to stay all night, and I was just getting so frustrated that I started writing something new.
“This call that we had, it went really badly. But the guys came in the next day, and I was super happy. They were like, ‘How was the call?’, and I was like, ‘I don’t care about the call. This is what we’re making’, kind of thing … We had always talked about doing something really technically ambitious, the procedural generation idea and using it to make planets … And then there was this emotional element; we wanted this feeling of being on a planet for the first time. So those two things just kept swirling around in our heads … But it took that sort of anger and frustration to be like, fuck it, we’re doing it, you know.”
As we talk, I mentioned I’ve recently returned to the No Man’s Sky of 2016 and it turns out Murray revisits it on occasion too. “There are still some people who have never updated,” he explains. “So every now and then, we’ll sort of boot [it] up to give them some support. And the popular thing to say would be that I go back and I think, ‘Oh, that wasn’t the vision’ … But that’s not really how I feel when I go back to it. I think ‘This was cool’, you know? I feel really proud of it. I think it’s got a really weird esoteric feel to it that I personally love.
“And yeah, there’s lots of things that I miss from the updates,” he continues. “But for me, it’s really like happy memories going back to the purity of it. There was something magical about the sort of more bare bones visuals of it, and it feels more like something from the 80s. But yeah, I feel super proud of the team when I go back to it. The average team size was like six people, [so it’s like], ‘How did we do this?'”
No Man’s Sky’s August 2016 launch was, of course, a controversial one, but the first signs of a renaissance arrived just a few months later when Hello Games released the Foundation Update, adding base building, crop growing and more. From the inside, was there ever such an obvious turning point? “The nice story is that there’s this redemption arc, this comeback,” Murray replies, “and that there would be some sort of inflection point for the team; like, ‘Oh, we were doing things one way, and then we learned this important lesson, and now we do things a different way.'”
But that isn’t entirely accurate, he goes on. “That isn’t really the story of No Man’s Sky and the story of the team … This team is incredible and has always been incredible; I feel super proud of what they released. I feel super proud of what they’re doing now, and they have always been this team that has just cared so much about this game and so much about the community. And I think that shines through.”
For Murray, the journey has been a personal one too, “Oh my god, there is a lot that’s changed”, he says, emphasising his approach to communication. “Leading up to No Man’s Sky’s launch we were doing so much press – I think there was a day where I did 80 interviews with Sony – but now, it’s been like four or five years since I’ve talked to the press. The most we do is we tweet an emoji or something.”
Murray “never really wanted to do press,” he continues. “And when I did, I didn’t enjoy it. And also I wasn’t very good at it. Right now, if you look at our next game, Light No Fire, it’s just a very stark difference. We’ve put out a trailer, and then we haven’t said anything. And I think that’s probably the way people would prefer it in some ways too.”
Of course, at the mention of emojis, I can’t help but ask how Murray’s unusual tradition of whipping the community into a frenzy ahead of each new update – by posting a single thematically relevant emoji to social media – came to be. “I remember the conversation, which is going back to my own personal sort of journey on No Man’s Sky,” he says. “It’s my social media account and people were urging me to post more, and I was just like, ‘I’m done! I have no interest in this! I’m not going on social media! … My time should be spent just making the game!’, right?
“That’s sort of always been my attitude since release. That we should speak to people through the work that we do and the updates that we do. And I was having this sort of argument back and forth, and people were like, ‘Go on, just put something out, just say something. And I was like, what’s the minimum we can say and get away with it? And someone was like, one letter. And then someone else said an emoji, and I was like, ‘Fine, I’ll do an emoji, and then that’s all I’m doing on social media!'” And the rest, as they say, is history.
Since 2016, No Man’s Sky has received a massive 45+ named updates (and slightly fewer emojis), and I wonder if any have been particularly memorable for the team. “There have been some incredible moments”, Murray replies, pointing to the likes of 2018’s multiplayer focused Next update and last year’s Voyagers update. “It broke all sorts of records and things like that,” he says of the latter, “but like the weeks leading up to that launch, we did not know how that was going to go.”
Another major milestone arrived in 2024, when the scales finally tipped far enough that No Man’s Sky reached a ‘Very Positive’ reviews threshold on Steam. But does the studio still have its eye on that coveted ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ rating, I ask?
“It’s almost a mathematical impossibility because you have to have such a high level of positivity for each percentage point to go up, [which] becomes exponentially harder, or at least geometrically harder,” Murray explains. “But then it has kept happening, slowly over time. But one of my favourite moments was when we reached ‘Mixed’, you know, and we were celebrating like we had become ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’. We were so hilariously excited to finally be out of ‘Negative’, right? But you know, it’s not what we do it for; if it happens, it happens. But we’re very lucky that our current reviews are like ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ and have been for years. You know, it’s really lovely.”
10 years, though, is a long time. And it seems even Murray can’t quite believe he’s still developing No Man’s Sky a decade on. “If you had told me 10 years ago I’d still be working on the same game, I would have assumed I’d be bored or not excited coming into work every day. But it’s the opposite … I feel a lot more zen about the development of No Man’s Sky day today … And we’ve been through so much that we can come in and really enjoy it.”
It likely helps that the game has continued to evolve so much as to still feel fresh for the team working on it. “It’s such an ambitious project, and it’s such a huge canvas … and we’re still trying to do fun things,” says Murray. “You can think of so many things and be like, ‘Oh my god, that would be cool … We’re not just sitting there going, ‘Oh well, each month we release two new characters and three new skins or whatever. We’re not really of that mindset.’
“We’re working really hard on Light No Fire at the moment,” he continues. “And you know, I have to bite my lip to not talk to you about that game, right? And to not show it to people, but I am so incredibly excited about it, and it is such a joy to work on … But when I move back to No Man’s Sky for a bit, it’s like an old friend. And it’s a different vibe. You know what you’re working on is going to go out in the next month or two, and you know who your player base is, and you know what they’re into, and what they’re excited for, and what they like about the game, and what they don’t.”
That last part is essential when it comes to No Man’s Sky, where the community’s own desires have informed Hello Games’ approach over the years. “It’s such a sort of symbiotic relationship,” as Murray puts it, “and we just wouldn’t be excited about it without [our] community. We stop work tomorrow without [them], because it is such a big part of why we do it and in deciding what we do.”
But for now, happily, the community persists, and No Man’s Sky’s doomed universe continues to thrive. Hello Games might have set its sights on new horizons with Light No Fire – whose development Murray suggests is further along than we might suspect – but it sounds like there’s still plenty of life left in its beloved space sim too.
“I feel – and I think the team does too – very lucky to have this opportunity to work on it,” says Murray. “And I feel very lucky to have the team that we have, who are just very into this game, this project, this journey. Hopefully we will get to see more and more steps on that journey. I’m excited for those more than sort of reminiscing about the past. I’m excited for what No Man’s Sky can be in the future.”
