In December 2013 four people from a small studio in Guildford took an 11-hour flight to an American awards show with a two-minute trailer that, by their founder’s account, most people who had seen it thought they should not show. Sean Murray had shown it to about ten people beforehand, “and eight of them told me to not show it, that it wasn’t good enough and that it was a very strange game that people wouldn’t understand.” The trailer was for No Man’s Sky, a space game whose planets were generated by the program as the player found them. It made Hello Games famous. Its launch in 2016 made the studio the target of a long, angry backlash, and the years of free updates that followed turned the game into one players returned to.
Fast facts
- Founded: 2008, in Guildford, Surrey, by Sean Murray, Grant Duncan, Ryan Doyle and David Ream; incorporated on 4 August 2008.
- Background: Murray had worked at Criterion Games on Burnout and Black.
- Games: Joe Danger (2010), Joe Danger 2: The Movie (2012), Joe Danger Touch for iOS, No Man’s Sky (2016), The Last Campfire (2020).
- Announced: Light No Fire (2023).
Joe Danger
Murray and his co-founders came from large teams. “I’ve worked on games like Burnout and Black, where we had 100 people working on the team, and no one person even had one-tenth of that codebase in their heads,” he told Edge. Hello Games was one of the studios that grew out of Criterion and its neighbours in Guildford, a story told in the Guildford games cluster entry.
The four founders made their first game on their own, with their own engine, and self-published it on the PlayStation Network, Edge reported. Joe Danger (2010) was a stunt game about a motorbike daredevil, which Edge described as a “’stunt ‘em up’, a genre patchwork which draws from racers and platformers”. It gave it seven out of ten and found it frustrating and lovable by turns: every time Joe crashed and climbed back on his bike, “it’s hard not to feel like you owe him another 67 tries.” Murray was candid about how it was finished: “We’re proud of Joe Danger, but finished it because we ran out of money rather than ideas. We were constrained by only having one artist.”
The sequel, Joe Danger 2: The Movie (2012), sent Joe to Hollywood to do the stunts for a film, with skis, a hang-glider and a police bike among the ways of getting about. Edge found it “an oddball blend of Mario and an early Sonic game”, and Hello Games followed it with Joe Danger Touch, a version for iOS.
No Man’s Sky
Murray traced the idea for No Man’s Sky to his childhood. “For a good part of my childhood, we lived in the Australian outback on a massive farm,” he told Edge in 2014, a few hundred miles from anyone else, under a night sky with “more stars than you’ve ever seen in your life”. As a boy he played games and began programming on an Amstrad CPC, and he “always thought that’s where videogames would go, that we would create videogames that just contained the whole universe”.
The game’s universe is generated by rules rather than stored. Edge reported that every rule had to be explicable “in a single sentence of plain English”, so that each of the three programmers working on it could keep the whole system in their heads. The procedural generation entry explains the idea; Wireframe later put the number of planets at about 18 quintillion.
After the trailer was shown at the VGX awards in December 2013, the pressure grew. “I’m ten times more nervous now,” Murray told Edge. “I feel much more comfortable being the underdog that no one expects to deliver.” Later that month, on Christmas Eve, a river burst its banks and flooded Hello Games’ office. “We’ve lost most things - PCs, monitors, furniture, a door, a wall,” the studio said. In January Murray promised the team would make up the time: “We won’t let that happen.”
Launch and recovery
No Man’s Sky came out on the PlayStation 4 and PC in August 2016. Many players found that features they believed had been promised were missing, and the studio said very little in public for months while the anger grew. Complaints reached the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, which ruled in November 2016 that the game’s Steam store page was not misleading, accepting that a procedurally generated game would differ from player to player. Wireframe later called the game “somewhat unfairly maligned at launch”: Hello Games “took a lot of flak for (apparent) promises unfulfilled but worked very hard over the years that followed”.
The work came as free updates. Foundation (November 2016) added base-building; Pathfinder (March 2017) added vehicles; Atlas Rises (August 2017) added a new story and limited multiplayer; Next (July 2018), released alongside an Xbox One version, brought full multiplayer; Beyond (2019) added virtual reality, and Origins (2020) reworked the planets. Wireframe’s reviewer found that Next “narrows the focus” on to the small, shareable adventures inside the vast universe. The updates continued into the 2020s, with versions for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and, in 2022, the Nintendo Switch.
Between updates the studio made a smaller game. The Last Campfire (2020), a puzzle adventure in which the player frees trapped creatures called the Forlorn, was “the sort of game you get lost in”, Wireframe said, giving it 86 per cent. At The Game Awards in December 2023 Murray announced Light No Fire, a fantasy game set on a single shared planet.
Sources
- Edge issue 216, July 2010, p. 100: Joe Danger review, seven out of ten.
- Edge issue 234, December 2011: Joe Danger: The Movie preview (the four founders, their own engine, self-publishing on PSN; “finished it because we ran out of money rather than ideas”).
- Edge issue 246, November 2012: Joe Danger 2: The Movie review.
- Edge issue 251, March 2013: Joe Danger Touch review (iOS, published by Hello Games).
- Edge issue 263, February 2014: No Man’s Sky feature (the VGX trailer; Murray’s childhood and the Amstrad CPC; Criterion, Burnout and Black; rules in a single sentence; “ten times more nervous”).
- Wireframe issue 1, November 2018, p. 60: No Man’s Sky Next review.
- Wireframe issue 12, April 2019: the 18 quintillion planets.
- Wireframe issue 45, November 2020: No Man’s Sky after launch (“took a lot of flak”).
- Wireframe issue 47, January 2021: The Last Campfire review, 86 per cent.
- Companies House, Hello Games Ltd, company 06663645 (public record): incorporation on 4 August 2008; registered office in Guildford. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/06663645
- “Hello Games Offices Suffer Flood On Christmas Eve”, Game Informer, 25 December 2013, and “Hello Games won’t delay No Man’s Sky in the wake of flood”, Push Square, 16 January 2014 (web, secondary): the flood, what was lost, and Murray’s promise not to delay the game. https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/12/25/hello-games-offices-suffer-flood-on-christmas-eve.aspx
- “‘No Man’s Sky’ cleared in false advertising investigation”, Engadget, 30 November 2016, and TheSixthAxis, 30 November 2016 (web, secondary): the Advertising Standards Authority ruling. https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/30/no-mans-sky-steam-asa-investigation/
- Hello Games, No Man’s Sky release log (web, secondary): the major updates. https://www.nomanssky.com/release-log/
- Wikipedia, “No Man’s Sky” (web, secondary): release dates; the update dates; the Switch version in 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky
- Wikipedia, “Hello Games” (web, secondary): the founders; the studio’s silence after launch; Light No Fire at The Game Awards 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Games