No Man's Sky (2016)
No Man's Sky is a 2016 shooter video game made by Hello Games and 505 Games.
A single traveler wakes beside a broken ship on an unnamed planet, one speck in a universe of over eighteen quintillion worlds. No Man's Sky hands you a scanner, a mining tool, and a direction: up. You name the creatures you find, chart star systems no one has seen, barter with the Gek and Vy'keen, and slowly piece together the riddle of an entity called the Atlas. Survival bites at first, with toxic storms and failing life support, but the pull is exploration for its own sake. Years of free updates turned a lonely launch into a vast, living frontier.
Quick answers
What is No Man's Sky about?
A single traveler wakes beside a broken ship on an unnamed planet, one speck in a universe of over eighteen quintillion worlds. No Man's Sky hands you a scanner, a mining tool, and a direction: up. You name the creatures you find, chart star systems no one has seen, barter with the Gek and Vy'keen, and slowly piece together the riddle of an entity called the Atlas. Survival bites at first, with toxic storms and failing life support, but the pull is exploration for its own sake. Years of free updates turned a lonely launch into a vast, living frontier.
When was No Man's Sky released?
No Man's Sky was released on 9 August 2016.
Who made No Man's Sky?
No Man's Sky was made by Hello Games, 505 Games and Sony Interactive Entertainment.
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No Man's Sky in our writing
- Companion guide: Hard Science Fiction: The Complete Guide to Rigorous, Realistic Futures
- Companion guide: Megastructures: The Complete Guide to Ringworlds and Big Dumb Objects
- Companion guide: Space Exploration
- Companion guide: Space Opera
A few thoughts on No Man's Sky
For the same ache of deep-space solitude, watch Project Hail Mary, where one man wakes alone with a mystery to solve. Vangelis's Blade Runner score is the ambient sound of drifting between stars, and Del the Funky Homosapien's Deltron 3030 builds a whole dystopian cosmos out of rhymes and static.
Cosmic mysteries too vast for the people investigating them
No Man's Sky sets one traveler loose in a galaxy built around a riddle, the Atlas, too vast for one person to solve. 2001: A Space Odyssey frames its own cosmic mystery the same way, with answers bigger than the humans chasing them, Interstellar and Project Hail Mary send a small crew after planet-scale problems, and Ghost in the Shell asks similar questions about consciousness inside something vast.
Ambient, cosmic soundtracks for staring up at a strange sky
No Man's Sky's own soundtrack leans ambient and cosmic, so these albums sit well next to a long scan of an unfamiliar planet. Black Holes and Revelations and Simulation Theory both drift between deep space and simulated futures, Irrlicht builds pure atmosphere out of drone and echo, Universal Migrator, Part 2 scores its own interstellar flight, and the Blade Runner soundtrack turns synths into weather over an alien skyline.