Indie Developer Sean Murray Boldly Goes Where No Gamer Has Gone Before

Will leaving a big-studio gig to follow his passion and create a new type of gameplay pay off?

- MIKE ROUGEAU

Everyone dreams of being an astronaut; Sean Murray made a game that lets you play one. This summer, the 36-year-old’s company, Hello Games, released one of the most ambitious video games in recent history: No Man’s Sky. The gorgeous sci-fi adventure allows players to explore more than 18 quintillion planets—yes, quintillion—thanks to clever environment-generation technology. Travel to massive worlds suff-used with rich colors and teeming with alien creatures—then dodge galactic cops in your spacecraft.

The Ireland-born, Australian outback–raised Murray created his first game when he was just five. “My parents always joke that this is all I ever wanted to do,” he says.

Murray founded Hello Games in 2008 with three friends after quitting his job at Criterion, a big studio that got bought by EA, an even bigger studio. Sick of slaving away on blockbusters such as the Burnout series, he wanted to flex his creative muscles. Today that’s not a unique origin story for an independent game developer, but back then, in the days before the Apple App Store, it was.

“We were some of the first people to do that,” he says. “In our minds, it wasn’t some path to success. It was more like, I can’t work here anymore, and I need to go do something different.”

No Man’s Sky, the third release from Hello Games, launched in August after three years of feverish buildup among gamers obsessed with the promise of endless exploration. It’s a high-water mark for video games—and like a true artist, that’s all Murray really cares about. PLAYBOY spoke with Murray just before the U.S. launch of No Man’s Sky; here’s what he had to say about setting out to make an impact, dealing with fan backlash and exactly what makes Hello Games successful.