No Man's Sky

Introduction

This month marks the ninth anniversary of the release of No Man’s Sky, first published in 2016. Its launch generated extraordinary hype, but excitement soon gave way to disappointment before years of updates transformed the game into something far beyond its original form.

I followed that launch with interest, not because of its marketing, but because of its technical idea. I had long been fascinated by procedural generation, first through Benoît Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1983). The thought that mathematical patterns and pseudo-random generators could create entire planets felt like a direct application of that theory. When I finally played the game seriously in 2023, I saw both its possibilities and its flaws. The planetary biomes—radioactive, toxic, cold, hot, desert, and hospitable—introduced hazards and defined local economies. Yet their repetition made the differences difficult to perceive. Critics noticed the same issue at launch: Philip Kollar (2016) argued that survival mechanics overshadowed exploration, while Sam Machkovech (2016) praised the technical achievement but described the gameplay as monotonous. I think of this as the “oatmeal problem”: each bowl is technically unique, but one day’s serving feels very much like the last.