Sean Murray Uncut – The Full No Man’s Sky Interview

Earlier in the year we sat down with Sean Murray, Hello Games managing director, to talk about No Man’s Sky, the evolution of the studio since Joe Danger, and whether he still considers himself to be an indie developer. Here’s the full interview

We guess the press this time around has been a little different. We remember you visiting us in Bournemouth to show Joe Danger and now you’re appearing on US chat shows…

The whole thing has been different, like going on stage at E3. We came down to Bournemouth trying to get people to write about Joe Danger and we hadn’t a clue what we were doing. Just turning up on journalist’s doorsteps pretty much. It’s obviously a very different game, but that was a different, slightly more real experience. Going on a TV show, however fake it looks from home, it’s super fake behind the scenes. It’s weird.

We remember that Joe Danger came about because you started playing with a box full of toys and found inspiration in an Evel Knievel doll. Did you do the same again?

We’ve knocked down the wall since, but downstairs there used to be a little reception room where you guys came in and we split the team basically. We took four of us and we went back into that little room trying to almost recreate the situation we had when we were making Joe Danger. It was like ‘let’s have this little, new startup before we think of another game’. We didn’t tell any of the rest of the team about what we were making or what we were doing and we properly blocked off the door, so we had our own little entrance and stuff. It sounds mad and it sounds like we should all hate each other. The nearest equivalent to the box of toys was we bought a bunch of second hand sci-fi books, cut covers off them and gathered together loads of reference. We covered the walls, floor to ceiling, with sci-fi imagery. That wasn’t quite the equivalent, but you can’t sit in a room like that and not just soak it in, even if you don’t want to. That was actually how we ended up on the VGXs (Video Game Awards show). We never actually showed anyone the game, but Geoff Keighley had been at Media Molecule and he had actually shown the first trailer for Joe Danger, which was a big favour for us, and I was like ‘come over, I must thank you’. I hadn’t met him in real life, but he came over and we hadn’t had any press in either and he walked into this little room and said, ‘what is going on here?’. We’d just covered all the walls with sci-fi imagery and I had to say ‘nothing to see here, out you go’. It was months later that he said ‘we’re doing the VGXs and what are you up to in that little room?’. That’s how it came about. He could tell, at the very least, that there was something weird going on and we weren’t making Joe Danger 3.

So you started with the concept of something sci-fi, but was it just ideas bouncing around from then?

No, it was weird. We had a reasonably clear idea of what we wanted No Man’s Sky to be. You can ask around about this, but the thing they always say about working with me is that I will have an idea and everyone will have ideas, but I will just keep repeating mine and slowly wear everyone down to the point where they’ll just say, ‘let’s just do what he’s saying, just to shut him up’. Or probably it goes in enough and they’re more like, ‘that is a good idea’. For instance with the name of the game we wrote lots of names up on the board and I would be like, ‘or, No Man’s Sky’. And we would all go through and mark off ones that we hated and I would be at the board and they’d say ‘put a line through that one’, and I’d say, ‘well, let’s just leave No Man’s Sky up there for the moment’. It’s actually been three years since we went into that little room, which blows my mind, but I started on the engine about a year before that and it was just me, on my own. I would just do it in my spare time, during the evenings and weekends.

What happened was, during the end of Joe Danger it was a pretty hard time. We were excited about the game and we were enjoying ourselves, but I had done stupid stuff like I had sold my house to fund the game and we were wracking up debt. And so to keep yourself sane you actually talk about other things. This is what I’ve always found when finishing a game, you talk about other things, what other kinds of games you could make. With Joe Danger you’re sat there and yes, you enjoy the process of making the game, but by the time you’re fixing bugs you’re like, ‘I hate Joe Danger! Look at his stupid little face. I want to punch him’. What keeps you going is saying, ‘how about if we did this or how about if we did that?’. And we had this thing that we called Project Skyscraper, which we always had on our website under ‘games that we make’. It was Joe Danger and Project Skyscraper and it was kind of a joke. The other game that we make in the description said ‘Secret Project: The most ambitious game ever made’. And it was this nice little joke that we had going on amongst ourselves. ‘We could do this or this and this is how it would be built’ and so on.

Then Joe Danger was successful and it was a reasonably designed idea. There wasn’t all the detail, there wasn’t a design document, but we had been talking about how it could work. It’s sort of simple to design because it’s this thing that we sort of have in the back of our minds, a game where you get in your spaceship and you fly around and you visit planets. It’s like the design of a child. We’d always talked about it and we knew what it was, Skyscraper, and then it kind of died out as an idea.

We moved into this studio, we hired more people and everything became a bit more proper. We were employers and it was a bit less crazy for a while. Then I started to get a little bit tired of that and I couldn’t picture myself making Joe Danger 3 or something that was of a similar size. And I could see that coming, almost like the lights of this truck that’s going to hit you and it’s moving really slowly but you can’t stop it. I just wanted to get away from that. I was like, ‘hat I actually want to do is start up a new studio, and that sounds really bad even though I’m here with all you guys and we’re all having fun and I’ve employed you all, I sort of just want to get away from all this’. This is like responsibility and I have to think of a game idea that will require ten people. I think to think of something that’s about doable. But not too few people needed and not too many. You end up coming up with something that’s a bit like Joe Danger. I just wanted to do a different thing.

For me, I was actually starting to not enjoy things and at almost my lowest point I was here and I had to do a conference call with Microsoft. Joe Danger had gone up on XBLA and we did Joe Danger SE [Special Edition] and I think it got a Metacritic of 92 per cent or something, it was the ‘ultimate version’ and it got really good reviews, but it was nowhere on the store. And that was a real low point because we had worked so hard, but we were so insignificant, basically, as a studio. That’s no fault of Microsoft’s, that’s just how things were. I think Gears Of War DLC launched the same day, so we’re not going to be featured then, but you couldn’t find us anywhere. So, I had this conference call to talk about it and I was raging. Everyone else had gone home and I had to stay until five in the morning, so I just started writing code. I just started a new project. I didn’t want to write any Joe Danger code, so I just started writing new code. The guys came in in the morning and I had stayed all night and I was like, ‘we’re doing it! We’re going to do Skyscraper!’. And I had this awful demo. It looked a bit like Minecraft, but on a planet and I said, ‘aren’t you all excited?’. And no one was because it looked terrible and impossible. But I then just developed that over a year. So it was designed, it wasn’t a ‘let’s get in, there are no terrible ideas’.

How much of that demo is still in the game?

I find this really… not depressing, but… after about five months you could look at it and look at it now and go, ‘that looks a bit like No Man’s Sky’. Which is a really nice feeling in some ways because there’s some consistency there. You could fly between one planet and another and in fact the first planet you flew to was snowing and a lot like the one we just showed you in some ways, so there’s a moment of that being really nice. There was some consistency of vision. But there’s also a moment of ‘what on earth have we been doing for the last two years? It was there!’. But you would see that it was really crappy looking and there were loads of problems and you’ll find you’re flying a cube, basically, rather than a space ship. From the early days a bunch of the concepts are still there, like actually the sentinels were there, scanning creatures, scanning trees, flora and fauna, the terrain were kind of there. I dug it out recently and I had forgotten all of that stuff had been there. And even some of the aesthetic was there as well; you could kind of get a sense of that. I mean, nothing worked and it was all terrible and full of nonsense, but you don’t realise it at the time that you’re forming the idea as you go in such a consistent way.

It was already procedural at that point?

Yeah

So, it has just been refinement from that point on?

It doesn’t feel like that. I don’t know if I can describe this well, but if you had asked me at the time, I couldn’t have told you which bits were going to make it to the end and which bits weren’t. I didn’t know what shape it was in at the time, but I can look back now. It’s like if people show you their babies – and I’m terrible with this – all babies look the same. You’re like, ‘it’s a baby’. And other people say it looks like its Dad or something like that, but I can’t see that. But when they’re older you can look back at pictures of an adult from when they were a child and see it was blatantly the same person. It’s so obvious, but when you look at a child you can’t tell what they’re going to look like when they get older, or at least I can’t.

It was the same thing with the game. You’re looking at it and you’re thinking, ‘I don’t know what this is going to turn out to be’. But now I can look back and think, ‘how could we have not known, it was exactly that the whole time’.

Was it important to have a touchstone like Minecraft to prove you were moving in the right direction?

It’s exactly that. We weren’t sitting around thinking, ‘we want to make a game like Minecraft’. It’s been really affirming. There are so many things that most of us have felt for ages, I think, in talking about games. We’ve all felt like ‘I wish games were more like this or had more of these elements’. And it’s great to have Minecraft because you can use it for everything. There are all these rules that people thought existed such as ‘people will only buy Call Of Duty’, and it’s just really nice to say that the best selling game in the world is //this//. It proves that you don’t need photorealistic graphics, it proves that you don’t need massive cut scenes, it proves that you can be really creative and innovative and different. You can see people in the industry using it all the time as an example, ‘this disproves loads of the things that you were saying and thinking about gamers and how people play games’.

I remember when it first came out, it was fascinating to watch my nieces and nephews play it. They were playing it in a way that I didn’t even understand. It was actually sad that I had lost the ability to see that you can just play a game and just play without collecting a coin or getting an achievement every ten seconds. I’m so used to that. I’m so programmed to that. You can watch a kid play Minecraft and say, ‘what are you doing right now?’ and they’ll say ‘I don’t know’. They’re just messing and they’re just playing like you would with Lego or something like that.

Minecraft also has an end game, but getting there isn’t necessarily the point. Is that also the case for No Man’s Sky?

I never know if it was a good thing or not to say you have to get to the centre of the universe, because it helps people to understand the game and that’s why we said it – it is an important part of the game – but what I want to scream at people is you’ll just be able to play lots of different ways. I’m actually pretty sure when you pick up the controller, for a lot of people, they won’t care about the centre anymore. It’s really hard to talk about a game. Having a game in front of you and being able to reference it and talk about it is fine. Having a conceptual game with a video and some screenshots and saying ‘imagine you’re enjoying yourself’ [laughs]. Until that point you need to have large, high-concept things, but actually they go away once you’re playing the game and you’re enjoying yourself.

Like I was saying earlier, with Destiny people seemed to need to understand beforehand that there was this story and this lore as they play through it and they were like ‘that’s why I will be playing Destiny’. But that’s nonsense. That’s not why you play Destiny. And it’s totally missing from the game and it was kind of weird to have that when I first played it. It feels like Halo but without all of the reason why I think I play Halo, but you realise that I’ve always played Halo not for its amazing narrative – because it’s never really had that anyway, it’s had some pretty cheesy sci-fi cut scenes – and I don’t really miss them actually. I just enjoy playing the game second to second.

It’s similar again to the Far Cry games of late, more about exploring than really playing the story?

That’s the way I am. Read Dead Redemption is a real favourite game of mine. I used to just go camping and stuff like that and it sounds ridiculous. Most people think there are triple-A games over here and then over there is this niche of PC gamers who enjoy games that are on Twitch and YouTube that none of us really understand. The kind of concept is The Long Dark ‘not really sure why anyone plays it, but there’s some kind of niche and they enjoy that and that’s where it will stay’. To me I think there’s this slow erosion taking place right now that’s happening and people aren’t really noticing. It’s going to come crashing across triple-A where I am sure we’re going to see Assassin’s Creed having much more sandbox style play, or at least that’s what I would like to see. That’s something that I would be really excited about. Far Cry for most people is much more about going out and exploring and living in that world. I don’t think I would miss it, me personally, if they removed a lot of the story and cut scenes and stuff like that, because I find that I’m just becoming bored of that. The fun I have is in going out and doing some of the crazier, sillier stuff. I wish they would put all the effort of cut scenes into just nurturing that.

Do you still consider yourselves to be indie developers?

I never know how to take that question. I haven’t had it many times, but I’ve had it from other indies. And it’s like, ‘Guys! Are you saying I’m not in the club anymore?’. And I’ve seen it online, people talking about the indie studio making No Man’s Sky and in the comments there will always be somebody saying, ‘I don’t think they’re indie anymore’. It’s like there’s this club and I don’t understand why, but I’m not allowed to be part of it.

I think there’s two things; there’s indie and there’s independent. This is how I’ve thought about this in talking with other indies. Independent is one of the more important to me, which is we’re self-funded and we have creative control and we go and make our own game. If the game is terrible we go bankrupt. Things like that are really important to the game making process. Not there’s anything wrong with not having that, but it’s an interesting distinction at least. Sony has been really good. Shuhei [Yoshida, President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios for Sony Computer Entertainment] doesn’t come down to the office and tell us what to do. Much that I love him, it’s kind of nice that that doesn’t happen. Sony isn’t trying to tell us how to make the game and that’s a good thing and as it should be. I think it’s really important to us that we don’t have some kind of massive that is making all the decisions for us and doing market research and telling us the main character should be some kind of space marine, or whatever.

So there’s that, which is being independent and that’s really important. There are a lot of indie studios who are not independent, but they are still indie. They’re working on a game that someone else is paying for that has a publisher and that’s fine. But it’s a separate thing, which is ‘indie’. And the word indie? God knows. To me I think of music, of indie bands when that meant something, innovation and taking risks and being a bit left of field. Having this overall spirit of running very close to the wire.

It’s hard to define, but the opposite of corporate, basically. That is something personally I feel that Hello Games still is. That’s the bit I would actually be sensitive about. I would feel hurt if someone said ‘you guys are really corporate now’. I would argue with them. And I think No Man’s Sky as a game is quite indie. There are other things as well, like the size of the team. I don’t think people realise that, although I think Kickstarter is making them realise that games that people might consider small games, like Broken Age or something like that, you can see that it has 30 people working it. It’s far bigger than No Man’s Sky is. My old bosses from Criterion are making Dangerous Golf, which is looking really cool, but they’re about the same size as Hello Games. We’re actually reasonably small as an indie studio. For a group that’s normally small, we’re super-small. We’re smaller than studios like Capybara. And I’m dead proud of that. I think when you look at everything that we’re doing, that’s pretty crazy and a really positive thing. I like the idiocy of that. When you look at No Man’s Sky, I do it a great disservice when people ask how it’s possible and I say ‘procedural generation’, but I say it as if it’s magic. [Waving his hand] ‘Procedural generation’. Someone asked yesterday, ‘then presumably it’s all made for you, so do you have anything to do?’. Yes, we’re trying to make three different games. One where you’re on a planet and it’s a survival game and one where you’re in space with combat and another where it’s about joining the two up, fighting over planets and trading between them and all that sort of thing. Apart from just the content, which is procedurally generated, it’s a huge game.

We’ll finish up with some quickfire questions. What’s your favourite space exploration game?

I would actually say the original Elite

What’s your favourite space movie?

These are not easy questions. I’m going to say Aliens

What planet would you love to visit?

I reckon I would go for Tatooine

Would you take the Virgin Galactic flight?

Yes. If I could afford it, absolutely

What’s your favourite space fact you’ve learnt while making the game?

My favourite thing is everyone calls star systems, solar systems and stars, suns and every time that I correct them they look at me like I’m crazy. There is only one sun and there is only one solar system. I’ve gotten to the point where I call everything solar systems and suns because I’ve given up. It’s not really a fact, but I need to get that knowledge out there. It should be star and star system.

What sci-fi novel would you recommend?

Dune. That’s my favourite of all time.

If you like some of the concept work for No Man’s Sky you should definitely check out 3D Artist’s Essential Guide To Game Art. Download it now!