What a trip it's been. Back in 2013, when a little team that was working out of a busted-up old studio they shared with a taxi rank on a small street in Guildford revealed its follow-up to a series of cute cartoon racing games, it was one of those moments. No Man's Sky captured the world's attention like few other games have before it. And for three years No Man's Sky was given the world's stage, making headline appearances at E3 conferences and with creator Sean Murray guesting on big-name US talk shows. "I thought Morgan Freeman was God!" quipped Stephen Colbert as Murray appeared on The Late Show and showed off his procedurally generated universe. "You're actually the second God I've had on the show."
And then, after years of hype, No Man's Sky launched. Some people loved it - us included, who fell a little in love with this flawed but fascinating sci-fi opus. And some people didn't. And some of those people got angry. The weeks following No Man's Sky's launch were a hotbed of controversy and upset, with claims of broken promises - mostly pinned around the suggestion of multiplayer in the run-up to launch - and disappointment that this wasn't the game that some people had in their minds. Things got nasty, and Hello Games retreated into a silence from which they've only just emerged.
And in that time they worked, and worked hard on adding to No Man's Sky, building on those early foundations in league with a dedicated community that has helped Hello Games take its game to some remarkable new places. Big updates followed - the last of which, Atlas Rises, saw some one million people playing on the day of its launch - and then Hello Games went quiet again, working for a year on the most significant update yet, introducing true multiplayer and a whole host of new features that we've run through elsewhere on the site. The reaction has been staggering - Murray uploaded a clip of the game's Discord watching the latest trailer, fans swearily losing their minds at the sheer spectacle of it all. It was like that VGX trailer all over again.