Charles even began to record Sunday sermons.

“I have this saying that’s been popular for the past year: ‘Go forth and spread thy love. And, by love, I mean lasers.’”

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At last year’s Fanfest, Charles had a surprise for EVE players: he turned up in appropriate attire. “Because the players called me pope in Twitter and on Facebook I turned up in full pope regalia and it just freaked everybody out, so it was a way to honour players that honoured me,” he laughs. He topped his brightly coloured cassock with a richly woven stole bearing the Amarrian insignia. The final detail came from his wife, Susan: she gave him a gold ring inset with four diamonds to represent each of the four empires.

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As he walked around the halls of Reykjavik’s Harpa building at EVE Fanfest, people would stop him to thank him for his help in game. It also birthed a new tradition and phrase in EVE culture: “Bend the knee and kiss the ring.” More than 30 players bowed to kiss the ring, from general players to members of the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), the board of players elected to work with developer CCP to keep the game’s course steady. When people in EVE talk about kissing the ring, it’s not the CSM members people remember, it’s the Mittani.

The Mittani is the best-known player in EVE, both in and outside of the game. He is the head of Goonswarm, one of the game’s oldest corporations, and has made a name for himself by acing the political machinations of running large alliances in EVE. He is also a bit of a dick.

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So, when The Mittani bent his knee and kissed the ring, even as a joke, it was a big deal. “When that happened, that was worldwide headlines in the game,” Charles recalls. “Because it was like ‘He doesn’t respect anybody, so who the hell am I that he would actually bend the knee?’”

Later, the Mittani even renamed his alliance, the CFC, to The Imperium in the pope’s honour, Charles tells me. “I’m not even a member of their group, but they did that.”

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Besides having flocks of people bend the knee to you, Space-poping is more than just a ceremonial role. It fell on Charles’s shoulders to call out blasphemy in the world of New Eden wherever he saw it, even if that was in the upper houses of Amarr royalty.

Last year, Charles said that the Amarr empress didn’t say she was a servant of God but that she was God, a blasphemous, heretical statement even in the language of EVE. There was only one thing for it: EVE needed its first inquisition. “As the pope,” Charles pointed out, “There’s only one person who can launch an inquisition: me.”

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Charles, along with The Mittani and his alliance of thousands of players, invaded a sector of space called Providence, calling for them to “bend the knee.” Charles says they attacked “to disabuse the Jamylites of their commercial infrastructure of corruption.” It was EVE’s first player-led religious war.

CCP had a long-term plan for the empress. For years now the developer has been developing the backstory of the NPC characters in New Eden. It hopes to draw in new players by having them take part in missions that play off a more traditional scripted story, one that simultaneously introduces them to the sandbox nature of EVE’s MMO. Now, however, with one of the players (a pope no less) calling the empress blasphemous and calling on other players to reject her legitimacy, there was a problem.

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A problem with a simple solution: CCP killed her off.

“I’m not saying I had anything to do with it, but I probably did,” Charles jokes.

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The fallout of the empress’s death played out this year at Fanfest, with a PvP tournament called the Amarr Championship taking place. It’s the first tournament CCP has run since 2003 and the result determined who would succeed the murdered empress.

The whole encounter is a wonderful example of how the players in EVE create stories and motivations for each other to play out, stories that CCP can have a hand in developing, leading to changes in game.

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It was only at the end of our interview that I asked what Charles does for a living in the real world. He’s spent the past 30 years working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, investigating any faults that occur in its rockets. At one point he even served on the Mishap Investigation Board. Yes, EVE Online’s Space Pope was once a real life member of MiB, the group that inspired the Men in Black.

I don’t know which side of his life is more incredible.


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This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, bringing you original reporting, game culture and humour with a U from the British isles. Follow them on @Kotaku_UK.