Easily my favorite go-to for no-nonsense, highly-technical game analysis is Digital Foundry. DF brings news and deep-dive looks at modern (and retro) games using custom capture and analysis tools to deliver unique insight into the titles gamers know and love. As a tech-minded gamer and developer, I feel they are without peer.
In response to Hello Games’ recent release of the No Man’s Sky Worlds Part I update (v5.0), Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter, John Linneman, and Alex Battaglia discussed in a recent video just how monumental and untraditional the release of this massive update — eight years after the game’s launch — really is.
Here, I wanted simply to share the video and some of what was said about just what Hello Games has done, here.
Ok, so this kind of came out of nowhere and, what can I say, I think it’s pretty terrific. No Man’s Sky received a massive update this week and it looks like — the argument seems to be from Hello Games — that, it’s like, “Ok we’ve developed this fantastic new rendering technology for our brand new game that’s coming up [Light No Fire] but what we’ve actually done is to kind-of inject it into our old game, and it’s been transformed in the process.”
…and I think what’s fantastic about this particular update is that they didn’t really need to do it. All eyes are on the next game, right? But, they’ve turned what they’ve invested time-wise into this new game into an update for No Man’s Sky — and it’s just phenomenal. I just can’t quite get my head around it. Is this unprecedented?
Richard Leadbetter, Technology Editor at Digital Foundry
For myself and many others it seems, the Worlds Part I update has truly been transformative as far as the look and feel of wandering through the No Man’s Sky universe.
A Tweet of Two Apples: “No Man’s Sky” to Land on Mac and Apple AR/VR Headset
When something new is about to land in the world of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games’ chief Sean Murray, tweets a teaser emoji to start people speculating wildly. On Monday morning he posted a simple red apple emoji, which started the hype-train rolling and then several hours later, followed with another tweet — this time a green apple emoji, which switched the train into overdrive. Given that I have been keeping my eyes wide open for any more news of the long-known, impending Mac port of No Man’s Sky, I am quite certain that this is Sean’s indication that the Mac version of NMS is imminent. And the timing makes perfect sense, what with Apple’s yearly World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) being set to kick off with Monday’s (June 5th) keynote event.
A year ago, at WWDC 2022, Apple highlighted the coming Mac port of the game as a platform utilizing it’s new Metal 3 3D API, which offers close-to-the-metal performance, along with a feature known as MetalFX Scaling which is something of a mix between AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) and Nvidia’s DLSS. Apple featured No Man’s Sky as a sort of poster child for this tech during that keynote. They indicated that the game would be landing by year’s end (which it didn’t) and later that day in a press release indicated that not only a Mac version but also an iPad version of the game was forthcoming.
At 2022’s end, No Man’s Sky had not landed on any Apple hardware, though Apple did again shine the spotlight on No Man’s Sky in their January M2 Silicon event. Some speculated that Hello Games decided to coincide the release of the Mac version with the PS5 update to support the new PSVR2 in February, but that didn’t happen either, though the No Man’s Sky Fractal (v4.1) update that brought said support also delivered a nice array of other things for players, including the Utopia Expedition.
Interestingly, on May 5th a new development branch of No Man’s Skyappeared on SteamDB (for the first time ever) named “bejryy”. On the NMS Discord, it was soon discovered that a Caesar cypher decodes this string to “Orwell.” The original Macintosh was announced in January 1984 by way of the highly famous “1984 commercial,” depicting the Orwellian dystopia presented in the book 1984. It seems likely this branch is or pertains to the imminent Mac release.
Now, one of the main expected announcements out of WWDC 2023 is Apple’s long-rumored AR/VR headset (possibly to be called the “Reality Pro”), which the company is taking very seriously. It is rumored to be a standalone unit (that can also connect to a Mac and serve as its display) which will feature not one but two Apple M2 SoCs, which would give it the considerable computing and graphics power needed to drive its expected two 4K micro-OLED displays (at up to 3,000 pixels per inch) to deliver an 8K headset gaming experience. The headset is reportedly the most complicated product that the Cupertino-based giant has ever engineered.
During Apple’s WWDC 2022 keynote back in June, Apple announced that No Man’s Sky would be coming to the Mac, featuring the game as an example of one of the first apps to utilize Apple’s new Metal 3 graphics API along with one of the new features it brings, MetalFX upscaling. During the demo, Apple’s Senior Director of GPU Software, Jeremy Sandmel, said that the game would be “coming to the Mac later this year.” And in early October, Hello Games’ front man Sean Murray tweeted,
2022 has already been a busy year for No Man’s Sky – Sentinel, Outlaws, Leviathan, Endurance, SteamDeck, MacOS, PSVR2, Switch and several expeditions… and we aren’t done yet!
But as we saw, the year drew to a close without a Mac No Man’s Sky release. (Several other games slated for Mac release by year’s end were also delayed, for what that’s worth.) And, with 2023 underway, posts across various web forums from anxious would-be Mac Travellers have started to appear, asking about any updates on the status of the coming Mac release.
Those waiting anxiously may be pleased to hear that Apple held a press event today announcing new MacBook Pro laptops and Mac mini desktop models featuring new iterations of Apple’s M2 processor, and in that event, No Man’s Sky was again showcased, this time by Senior Engineering Program Manager, Mac, Erin Turullols, as can be seen in the bookmarked video clip below.
And the new Mac mini is also great for games, running demanding titles like No Man’s Sky at even faster framerates. With this supercharged performance, the new mini with M2 runs laps around the competition.
The No Man’s Sky section of the event showed the game running on an Apple Studio Display, with a Mac mini and a Sony PS5 DualSense wireless controller by its side. There is little reason to assume that the demo footage shown in the video was actual footage of the game running on Apple hardware. More than likely, It was a PR clip from Hello Games, generated on a PC.
Unfortunately, no release timeframe was mentioned during the event, however, a bit of fine print shown at the conclusion of the video states that “No Man’s Sky will be available later this year.”
So, for anyone doubting that the game was still on the way — and there’s really no reason to have though that — the game is still on the way. Likely, No Man’s Sky will launch not only sometime in 2023, but soon. Some speculate that Hello Games is waiting for Sony’s Playstation VR2 launch for PS5 on February 22nd to release an update that takes advantage of the new headset while also using that opportunity to release the Mac version. That may be the case, or there may have simply been some setbacks in the development process that forced a delay in the Mac version’s release.
Whatever the reality, No Man’s Sky for the Mac will surely be here soon. (And for the iPad, too, if you believe what Apple stated in their web press release following the WWDC 2022 keynote, though as far as we’ve seen, Hello Games has made no mention of such a version anywhere else…)
WWDC Surprise: “No Man’s Sky” Is Coming to the Mac and iPad
Today, Apple live-streamed the keynote that kicked off its annual World Wide Developers Conference. Occurring every spring, WWDC serves as an opportunity for Apple to announce product updates to consumers, show off new software and OS features that are on the way, and put its latest development tools in the hands of the dev community.
During today’s keynote, Apple announced the new M2 processor, successor to the extremely performant / low power Apple M1 that kicked off the Mac’s transition from Intel-based processors to Apple Silicon. Apple showcased the M2’s performance in the first machines that will be receiving the chip, the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops. The coming, yearly update to the Mac’s operating system, called macOS Ventura, was also demonstrated. As is always the case, the new OS brings with it a variety of new technologies that were detailed during the keynote. One of those technologies is Metal 3.
Metal is a low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated 3D graphic and compute shader API created by Apple. It debuted in iOS 8 during WWDC 2014 and combines functions similar to OpenGL and OpenCL in a single API. Apple moved away from OpenGL as its core 3D API and created Metal in order to improve performance by allowing low-level access to the system GPU. It is comparable to other APIs such as Vulcan and DirectX 12 and is currently utilized by Apple’s macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS. WWDC 2017 saw the release of Metal 2 which brought various enhancements and optimizations. Today’s announcement of Metal 3 brings more features and improvements still, and Apple Senior Director of GPU Software Jeremy Sandmel took the stage today to demonstrate some of these new features.
And that’s when things got interesting. (The keynote video presented herein is cued up to the moment in question.)
The first first new feature of Metal 3 that Jeremy pointed to is MetalFX Upscaling which, it was revealed, is as a scaling technology akin to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (both of which are supported by the PC version of No Man’s Sky). While he began to speak, saying the following (quote below) about this feature, the keynote stream highlighted a MacBook Pro laptop running a game that looked so familiar to me that, in this completely unexpected context, I had trouble recognizing it.
We continue to improve Metal. It’s the software that powers hardware accelerated graphics on all our platforms, and now Metal 3 brings new features that will unleash the full potential of Apple Silicon for years to come.
Gaming at maximum resolution and quality looks awesome. And, to help game developers increase the performance of realistic and immersive graphics, we’re introducing MetalFX Upscaling which enables developers to render rich, visually complex scenes even faster. It works by rendering smaller, less compute intensive frames and then applies high quality spacial upscaling and temporal antialiasing — and it’s so cool.
No Man’s Sky, coming to Mac later this year, will be one of the first games to use MetalFX Upscaling. The framerate increases give you that responsive feel — and it looks beautiful.
There was … a Traveller … jetpacking up the hill of … a paradise planet… It took a few moments for my mind to take in what I was seeing, and it was at about that time that he stated that No Man’s Sky would be coming to the Mac later this year and that it will be one of the first games to utilize Apple’s new upscaling technology.
This is amazing news of which no one had heard even a hint. Hello Games’ front man Sean Murray didn’t even tweet a teasing emoji leading up to it. This came as a complete surprise to the entire No Man’s Sky community.
MetalFX Upscaling demo clip from the Apple keynote
And, what comes as a further surprise to those who watched the keynote is Apple’s announcement, in their own press release, that No Man’s Sky will also be coming to the iPad later this year. Nowhere during the keynote video was an iPadOS port of the game mentioned, which is a little surprising considering that in 2021, the iPad generated over 90% the revenue of the Mac.
As we have detailed in severalposts on this blog, No Man’s Sky runs quite well on Valve’s new mobile console, the Steam Deck, which started making its way into the hands of early adopters a few months ago. As more people are getting their hands on the new console, reviews of the system and reports of how well popular Steam games run on it are popping up with increasing frequency. And, some from game publications who have not traditionally covered PC gaming…such as TouchArcade.
Open world exploration adventure game No Man’s Sky is one I’ve hoped would come to iOS and iPadOS for a very long time. It felt like a perfect fit for Apple Arcade as well with how it gets major updates and supports playing with friends on everything. No Man’s Sky is coming to Switch, but the Steam Deck version has impressed me more than when I played the game on Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. It obviously isn’t as nice as playing it on a high-spec PC or PS5, but No Man’s Sky on a portable at 60fps is a sight to behold. My only hope for No Man’s Sky is cross progression between PC and consoles in the future. Until then, No Man’s Sky is a joy to play on Steam Deck.
Their thoughts on No Man’s Sky and inclusion of it in their “best games” roundup post is high praise that didn’t escape the notice of Hello Games’ chief Sean Murray. Sean recently tweeted a link to the post, with a brief quote from the write-up.
"No Man’s Sky on a portable at 60fps is a sight to behold"
It’s fairly likely that PC gamers and traditional console players (Playstation, Xbox) haven’t spent a lot of time at TouchArcade, whose primary focus is iOS (iPhone, iPad) gaming. Why, then, am I writing a post specifically about their assessment of No Man’s Sky?
Well, when I saw that tweet from Sean, my heart skipped a beat.
And that is because, way back in early 2008, I co-founded TouchArcade with Arnold Kim of MacRumors. I joined the MacRumors team in San Francisco to cover MacWorld Expo 2007 and was in the keynote audience at the Moscone Center when Steve Jobs took the stage and showed the world the iPhone for the first time. It was an amazing event. When we learned, a year later, that Apple would be releasing an iOS (née iPhoneOS) SDK, we knew that games would be coming — and lots of them. So, in April of 2008 we launched TouchArcade (snapshot from Wayback Machine), which quickly became the largest website dedicated to iOS gaming, a distinction that it still maintains nearly 15 years later.
The site grew fast and it wasn’t long before we were staffing up, contributing to print game magazines, and running an iOS gaming podcast. In recent years TouchArcade has branched out to include Nintendo Switch gaming news and, as can be clearly seen here, Steam Deck-related news. I personally worked the site for six years — three part-time and three full-time. I have not been significantly involved in its operation since 2015, and a few years later I stepped down as co-owner of TouchArcade to follow other pursuits.
At any rate, I appreciate the patience exhibited by readers who made it this far; I couldn’t let a shout out from Captain Sean to the gaming site that I helped bring to life go without a little bit of rumination spoken aloud.
Godspeed, Traveller.
“No Man’s Sky Outlaws” and the Wonderful New Solar Ships
Last week, Hello Games released No Man’s Sky Outlaws, a major update to the game that might just have you singing “Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate’s life for me!” Outlaws v3.85, Hello Games’ twenty-first major (and free) update to No Man’s Sky, greatly expands gameplay and mission mechanics for would-be pirates, including a new class of starships called Solar Ships, improved space battles, in-atmosphere ship combat, wingmen, pirate-controlled systems and space stations, visual enhancements, the sixth Expedition: The Blight, and much more, all detailed on Hello Games’ Outlaws release page.
Hello Games has a habit of releasing major updates when I am on an extended vacation with my family — and that was the case with Outlaws. As such, I was a bit late to the party in giving it a go (if only the upcoming Switch release were here already!). Having now spent a number of hours exploring the update, I am much impressed, and most so with the new Solar Ships. I can’t get over the look and feel of them, dramatically transforming as they take off, leave and reenter atmosphere, and land. Their solar sails, procedurally-generated variation, and “feel” — both on screen and VR is amazing to me.
I have been so impressed with these new ships that I put together a short video to share with readers, showing my first-acquired Solar Ship doing its thing, as well as a bit of the craziness involving both these new ships and ships of olde in a pirate attack on a planetary Trading Post.
While I am still feeling out the various new pirate mechanics and am only early-on in Expedition Six, the No Man’s Sky Outlaws update has added a whole new dimension to gameplay that I can already feel and much appreciate.
How are you liking it?
“No Man’s Sky” on Nintendo Switch – So, How Will They Do It? [Updated]
Many of us had wondered over the past few years if it would ever happen, and last week Hello Games announced that — yes — No Man’s Sky will be landing on the Nintendo Switch game console sometime this summer. [ Since this post was first published, a tweet from HG’s Sean Murray has announced October 7 as the launch date of the Switch version. More info can be found at the bottom of this post. ]
The news comes to the surprise of many who had assumed the Switch wasn’t up to the task of conjuring the limitless, procedurally generated universe of No Man’s Sky. And, indeed, Hello Games is certain to have had to make some compromises to get the game running on the Switch in a manner that maintains a solid framerate while remaining a real looker. But, as the No Man’s Sky Switch announcement trailer demonstrates, they seem to be having success in the effort. (And, yes, based on a number of small details in the trailer video, most notably the discernibly low resolution, I feel confident we have been handed in-game video of the Switch port of the game in that trailer.)
No Man’s Sky looks the best and plays the smoothest on high power gaming PCs, the Xbox Series X, and the Playstation 5. As the chart below shows, the older Playstation 4 — the game’s original target platform — is a considerably more powerful system than the Switch for playing a game like No Man’s Sky, which is particularly intensive as far as both GPU and CPU demands. So, how will they do it?
Nintendo Switch
Playstation 4
CPU
Tegra X1 (4x ARM Cortex-A57 cores) @ 1.02GHz
Jaguar (8x AMD x86-64 cores) @ 1.6GHz
GPU
Nvidia Maxwell w/ 256 stream processors
AMD GCN Radeon w/ 1152 stream processors
GPU Perf
393 GigaFLOPs
1.84 TeraFLOPs
System RAM
4GB LPDDR4 @ 1.6GHz
8GB GDDR5 @ 2.75GHz
Memory Bandwidth
26GB/s
176GB/s
Max Display Res
1920×1080 docked, 1280×720 mobile
1920×1080
One approach is the use of adaptive screen resolutions. Many console games vary their screen resolution depending on the complexity of the scene being rendered, even on today’s most powerful consoles. I have analyzed a still shot grabbed from the Switch announcement trailer at different source resolutions with several graphics editors and, counting the individual pixels for a section of the screen and calculating across the full screen width, I have determined that it is being rendered with a horizontal resolution of 640 pixels. It’s hard to estimate what the high and low marks will be for rendering in No Man’s Sky on the Switch, but the indicated scene appears to be rendering at half of the Switch’s mobile resolution of 1280 pixels wide. Such variable rendering would certainly assist in keeping the game’s framerate fluid.
Another performance enhancing approach that will certainly be employed on the Switch port is the use of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, a set of open source high quality upscaling algorithms that allows a game to be rendered at a lower resolution and scaled up by the GPU to a more desirable target resolution for significantly improved framerates with almost no reduction in image quality. And, the GPU of the Nvidia Tegra X1 in the Switch supports this technology.
It has been five years since I first blipped into the No Man’s Sky universe, finding myself dazed and standing next to that downed Rasamama S36 starship back in August 2016. After exploring the alien surrounds to find the elements needed for its repairs, I lifted off into space and set out on a journey of exploration that has not slowed down since.
A day one player, I quickly found No Man’s Sky to be the best game I had ever experienced (in a rather long life of gaming). The surreal and alien landscapes of one world after the next ever captivated me and I was gripped with the drive to relentlessly explore the strange and boundless universe that is No Man’s Sky.
In the aforelinked blog post written just weeks after I began my journey, I said of the game,
Playing No Man’s Sky is the best and most breathtaking gaming experience I have ever had in my life. The sense of the infinite and of limitless discovery is tremendous. I am just lost in this game.
“Game.” Is it a game? It certainly seems more of a pursuit, a hobby, even a passion than a game to me. Inserting one’s self into No Man’s Sky is to begin a potentially endless adventure, visiting world after world after world that no eyes have ever seen before. Worlds placid, worlds violent. Worlds teaming with beautiful and fascinating life both plant and animal. Dead worlds, as well. You can never know what’s waiting down below when you drop into atmo.
All my life I have dreamed of exactly this in gaming — an interesting, alternate universe, massive in scale, in which I can freely wander and explore at my own pace.That is what No Man’s Sky is to me, and it’s my observation that many others are similarly moved by the game. The fact that the universe is procedurally generated and that even the game’s creators can’t describe everything that’s out there to be encountered adds to the incredible sense of the unexplored, the alien. There is a lovely feeling of solitude to the whole experience of discovering a world, leaving your mark on it, and moving on to the next.
Having started out on the PS4, I quickly decided to build a high-end gaming PC specifically for the purpose of playing No Man’s Sky to the fullest, at a higher resolution and framerate and with faster storage than the PS4 could offer. Over the years, as Hello Games graciously extended and expanded the game with update after (free) update, I upgraded the PC in various ways and accumulated a perhaps shocking amount of No Man’s Sky related schwag / merch. (Time is not the only thing I’ve put into this game, as a Polygon article from 2017 details [updated version of the post, here on the blog].)
With what I believe is certainly the friendliest community in all of gaming, the social aspects of No Man’s Sky have been a real pleasure to be part of. Sharing stories, screenshots, planetary coordinates and just getting to know fellow players on the related Discord and subReddits has been a lovely experience. Making a new friend by happening upon a fellow Traveller, tending their base on some planet in the corner of the galaxy, is a rather nice occasional treat, as well.
At just over 3,200 hours in-game at the time of this post, I have found certain particular gameplay pursuits that keep me busy. For example, I’ve taken to building “tiny home” bases on particularly breathtaking worlds. More recently, I very much enjoyed playing through the two community-centric Expeditions that have recently taken place as part of the No Man’s Sky Expeditions update, which landed this past March. I’ve made a little fan art here and there. And, of course, I am ever exploring. Sharing what I’m up to in the game is the main point of this blog, so if you’ve an interest, have a look around!
Perhaps my favorite pursuit in No Man’s Sky is in-game photography. The game’s visuals are amazing, and capturing that perfect shot (thanks to the superb Photo Mode the game provides) of a world that almost certainly no one has ever before explored is extremely rewarding to me. This has been the case since the beginning and, as such, I keep several galleries of No Man’s Sky exploration photos. Photo sharing is a big part of the NMS Discord; showing the vistas you have captured and seeing what others out there have encountered is a lot of fun. Another way I like to share my shots is in a public Flickr photo gallery I maintain that contains, presently, 1000 images I have captured in my travels over the past five years, going all the way back to day one. These are the photos I consider to be the best of the approximately 15,000 screenshots I’ve apparently taken in the game since the beginning.
To mark the fifth anniversary of No Man’s Sky‘s launch, I wanted to focus on that gallery, which provides what I think is an interesting look at a Traveller’s (me) encounters across all versions of the game, starting on PS4 and ending on the PC. So much has changed, and such sights were seen. Take a look back through the various ages of No Man’s Sky — at the sights that most captivated me.
One of the things I most enjoy in playing No Man’s Sky is in-game photography. The visuals are so, well, otherworldly and striking that capturing the perfect shot is a challenge I take on many times in each play session. When No Man’s Sky Pathfinder (v1.2) was released, Hello Games added a proper Photo Mode to the game that is, in my experience, unmatched in any other game out there. It allows the action to be frozen while camera placement and various other filter options are tweaked for just the right shot. They further improved Photo Mode in the recent release of No Man’s Sky Prisms (v3.5), adding several new controls. In No Man’s Sky, “virtual photography” or “gametography” is quite a pleasure and easily done.
Unfortunately, despite the numerous enhancements (including VR gameplay) that No Man’s Sky Beyond (v2.0) brought upon its release in mid-September of 2019, it introduced a glitch to the screenshot system that is still there to this day. It doesn’t affect everyone; it is an issue for PC players using certain anti-aliasing settings. It took me a few days after Beyond arrived to notice it but I soon saw that, after the update, screenshots captured in Photo Mode, upon close inspection, looked as if the anti-aliasing had been completely turned off.
Now, a bit of history. With the release of No Man’s Sky Foundation (v1.1) in late-November 2016, Hello Games introduced (among many other features) TAA or temporal anti-aliasing. Prior to this, FXAA or fast approximate anti-aliasing and SSAA supersampling anti-aliasing were the two AA modes available in the game. TAA is much cleaner than FXAA, and is the mode I choose to use on my i7-6700K PC with Nvidia GTX-1080Ti. Another available mode is TAA+FXAA, but to me this looks a bit too soft, ever so slightly blurry — I prefer TAA. (SSAA was removed from the game early on.) And, with the release of No Mans’s Sky Prisms (v3.5), Hello Games added DLSS or deep learning super sampling for PC users with Nvidia RTX-class graphics hardware, which uses machine learning to perform rather impressive asset upscaling to 4K resolution.
As in-game photography is such a big thing for me, I tried a few different approaches and discovered that if I set my shot up in Photo Mode as per normal but used Steam’s F12-key screenshot feature, the resultant image looked great, just as photos taken with the “Take Screenshot” button / key used to look, before the glitch arrived. This has been my workaround to the issue, but I have submitted the issue with screenshot examples to Hello Game’s tracker site.
Click the photos in the embedded gallery above and have a look at the full-sized screenshots provided to see the issue described here. The top two screenshots were taken shortly after Beyond landed in 2019 while the bottom two were taken yesterday, in the Prisms update. The TAA anti-aliasing mode is active in both sets of photos. (And for a brief time there was an issue with the zoom / aspect ratio between the two screenshot approaches, as demonstrated in the first pair of screenshots above, but that was addressed in short order.)
Zoomed: Photo Mode “Take Screenshot” key on the left, Steam F12 screen capture on the right.…
“On the eve of the next generation” of game consoles (the new Sony PS5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X), Edge magazine, in issue #352 (Christmas 2020 issue), is running an article entitled “Games Of The Generation.” The piece includes a variety of industry notables sharing their pick of a game released since the arrival of the PS4 and Xbox One worthy to receive this title.
The list is comprised of 20 games, their advocates describing their reasons for bestowing such singular note upon them. Some are extremely well known — Red Dead Redemption 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Ico — while others are less so. And among them is Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky.
“…our Games Of The Generation awards go to the crème de la crème — those Edge has judged to represent the pinnacle of game design as we know it today.”
Within, legendary developer and founder of Llamasoft, Jeff Minter, has named No Man’s Sky his Game Of The Generation. With a development career that began in 1981 with titles for the Sinclair ZX80 micro, Minter is known for a great many (and frequently psychedelic) titles across many platforms, including 8 and 16-bit Ataris, C64, Amiga, Nuon, PC, iOS, Xbox 360, and PS4. Some of his most notable titles include Gridrunner; Hover Bovver; Attack of the Mutant Camels; the Virtual Light Machine/Neon; Space Giraffe; Tempest 2000, 3000, 4000; TxK,the iOS Minotaur Project; and Polybius. Additionally, he has long been one of this writers’ true industry heroes.
Soon after the launch of No Man’s Sky back in 2016, Minter began tweeting his enjoyment exploring the wild and alien, procedurally generated worlds that Hello Games had brought into being. A post on his blog from September 2106 (don’t let the title fool you) expresses the degree to which the game had impressed him. (His post was included in a list of articles reacting to No Man’s Sky on the first post made from this blog, “A Few Words About the Best Game I’ve Ever Played: ‘No Man’s Sky’”, on September 1, 2016.)
A brief excerpt from Minter’s assessment of No Man’s Sky (shown in full, above), follows.
Regarding a ‘game of the generation’, I think for me it’d have to be No Man’s Sky. Even back at the very start when there wasn’t a great deal of complex gameplay in it (and the developers were taking a right kicking for that), nonetheless I thought the style was fantastic (recreating almost perfectly the style of 1970s sci-fi book covers) and remarkably creating an explorable universe in that style was quite an amazing achievement. …
This nod from industry veteran Jeff Minter is mighty kudos, indeed, for Hello Games and the universe they have created with No Man’s Sky. And, thinking about it, this seems a rather apt post to have put together on Thanksgiving Day!
