Even though No Man’s Sky is one of the most anticipated games of the year, Hello Games Founder Sean Murray recently explained that he and his team were worried the public might not like the upcoming space exploration title.
In an interview with IGN, Murray said that only a small portion of the development team started working on No Man’s Sky, and he referred to the game as a “secret project.” After around a year of work, however, the small team showed it to the rest of Hello Games, and they prepared to allow the public to see a glimpse of No Man’s Sky during the 2013 VGX awards.
I think if we had been a normal studio, or we’d been all of Hello Games, we would’ve released a trailer at this point and announced it. We’d got some stuff on screen and it looked cool, and it looked about the size of something you’d figure was comparable to Joe Danger. But we couldn’t even see that – we looked at it and we were like, ‘This just looks terrible.’ And so we kept on working on it for another six months before we showed it anyone. We didn’t really show any of the rest of the team for about a year. They didn’t know what we were working on, and that built up a huge amount of pressure. So the first time we really showed people was the VGX [awards], when we pulled together a trailer in the few weeks before that.
Murray explained that “normally lots of people know about a game before it comes out,” saying that game developers, publishers, and even members of the press will have heard about the game. However, Hello Games decided to let the entire world know all at once during VGX (now called Spike Video Game awards). Murray mentioned that the team thought it “would be heading for terrible embarrassment,” as they didn’t know if people would like the game.
I thought we would be heading for a terrible embarrassment… It would make no sense to people and that would be the end of the project. It was going through in my mind, ‘If the reaction is really bad, will I still keep making this game?’ But the reaction was really good. People were really positive about it. I walked off in a kind of a blur having just shown it, and done a quick interview, and it was trending worldwide and it just kept trending for a couple of days. It was surreal. It just seemed to resonate with people
But, if people’s reaction to the game being shown at E3 2015 is any indication, the public ended up loving the idea of No Man’s Sky. Check out our own thoughts on the space exploration title in our preview.
[Source: IGN]
