From the very beginning, No Man’s Sky has looked unlike any other modern science-fiction video game. With its bizarre creatures, hallucinogenic skylines and polychrome environments, it eschews the gritty, steel-grey aesthetics of Mass Effect, Halo and Gears of War.
The themes of the game, too, hark back to a different form of sci-fi literature, less interested in galactic wars and more concerned with the philosophical and psychology elements of space exploration.
Here then, are some of the cultural influences Hello Games appears to have drawn on.
Chris Foss
Along with Star Wars conceptual designer Ralph McQuarrie, Foss has been mentioned several times by Hello Games as a visual inspiration for the technology in No Man’s Sky. The British artist, who has produced illustrations for dozens of classic sci-fi paperbacks, including Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, imagined futuristic spacecraft as highly complex architectural wonders rather than glorified airplanes, and used bright contrasting colours instead of traditional metallic greys (a look inspired by steam train design). He also worked with Alejandro Jodorowsky, producing astonishing concepts for the director’s abandoned Dune project.
Post-rock music
The game’s ethereal soundtrack, provided by Sheffield group 65daysof static, exudes the sort of hypnotic, woozy grandeur typical of post-rock, a genre known for its epic, instrumental soundscapes (see also Mogwai, God Speed! You Black Emperor, Labradford). Incidentally, 65daysofstatic has also written an alternative soundtrack to ... Silent Running.
Silent Running
Douglas Trumball produced special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Andromeda Strain before directing this ecological masterpiece about a spaceship carrying the Earth’s last forests into space. No Man’s Sky shares the film’s tranquil pace, and its interest in the cold vastness of space counterposed with the intricate wonder of the living organic world. The game’s protective sentinel robots (which often attack players who try to mine isotopes from plants) hark back to Silent Running’s gardening drones – Huey and Dewey.
The Culture novels
Rejecting the austere, logical galactic empires envisioned in the sci-fi golden age, Iain M Banks developed the concept of the Culture, a vast post-human utopian society, organised by a class of machine demigods known as the Mind. But with their stories of remote anarchist settlements spread throughout a vast cosmos, Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, Excession, etc, deal with similar themes to No Man’s Sky.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C Clarke’s story depicts the idea of alien intelligence through the medium of discovered artefacts, and in this way 2001 is surely an influence on this game’s use of abandoned outposts and strange extraterrestrial monuments to impart information to the player. Also, the hyperdrive graphics sequence in No Man’s Sky owes an obvious debt to 2001’s famed stargate sequence.
Dune
Frank Herbert’s grand vision of a feudal human civilisation scattered across countless planets is present in the very structure of No Man’s Sky. There’s also the same sense of a galactic economy providing shape to a scattered society, and of the interplay between finance and ecology.
Elite
No Man’s Sky designer Sean Murray played the classic 1984 space sim as a child, and its mix of galactic exploration, trading and space combat is blatantly apparent in the Hello Games title. Mining astroids, docking in space stations and getting chased by greedy space pirates are also familiar features.
The games of Novagen Software
In the mid-80s, Novagen Software produced several of the most fascinating sci-fi games of the home computer era. Created by programmer Paul Woakes, titles such as Mercenary and Damocles used simple vector-based graphics to produce incredibly well-realised worlds. As in No Man’s Sky, the player takes part in the stories as a lone space traveller trapped on deserted planets, but slowly discovering complex alien societies and intrigues.
Designer’s Republic
The seminal Sheffield design house mixed vibrant blocks of colour, Japanese iconography and the visual language of corporate logos to produce its classic work for bands such as Pop Will Eat Itself and Aphex Twin – as well as the PlayStation racing sim Wipeout. That game’s cool spacecraft design and chunky retro-futuristic fonts seem to be subtly referenced in No Man’s Sky.
Journey
With its lonely environments, scattered relics, minimalist narrative and plaintive soundtrack, award-winning PlayStation game Journey has a very similar feel to No Man’s Sky. Both games have a sort of mystical, quasi-religious approach to exploration, and both purposefully give the player enough ambiguity and freedom to interpret the meaning of it all in their own way.
Robert Heinlein
Throughout his writing career the influential SF author explored the philosophy of solipsism, an individual’s sense that they’re the only real, significant part of the universe – a feeling that No Man’s Sky and its millions of desolate worlds seems to be engendering in players. He also developed the theory that universes are created through the act of imagining them and that fictional realities exist as parallel dimensions. In No Man’s Sky, the generative algorithm is a form of imagination. The universe is therefore real.
