‘We built this studio to make No Man’s Sky,’ says Hello Games

No Man’s Sky developer Sean Murray says he formed Hello Games six years ago with a view to develop the hotly anticipated title.

Murray revealed that while he loves the studio’s previous game, Joe Danger, that title wasn’t what the company set out to do.

Hopefully you can get a sense with No Man’s Sky and what we’re trying to do; it’s a culmination of ambition for us,” said Murray. We pretty much made Joe Danger to give us the ability to make No Man’s Sky.”

The title is pitched as a procedurally generated scifi game that allows players to explore worlds and the universe at their own pace. Gamers will discover their own planets as they venture across the stars, as well as engage in space battles.

The idea has been in the making since the studio started under the codename Project Skyscraper. Murray said one of his goals was to make triple-A developers and publishers, such as his previous employers EA and Criterion, jealous of what his small UK studio could achieve, given the freedom to do so.

To do this, the universe Hello Games has created is vast. In fact, Murray calculates that if a player was to visit a planet every second, it would take them five billion years to find them all.

The developer is also keen to bring a fresh take on science fiction to games, likening the title to the old sense of discovery in books from the ‘60s, rather than the dystopian, space marine-filled narratives of the last 20 years.

We’re not trying to make Halo or Call of Duty,” said Murray. You can be bored in this game; it’s not going to be scripted. There will be space battles and dinosaurs, there’s a lot of fun to be had. But I had to do what I should do as a sci-fi explorer; I had to go out and find that.”