It would be safer and perhaps wiser for No Man’s Sky to skip the hype cycle in the wake of the game’s launch, during which Murray became a poster child for promises gone undelivered—almost a spiritual successor to Peter Molyneux. After that rocky release, Murray and his team decided not to move straight to their next project but instead to stick with No Man’s Sky, delivering upon all of their launch promises and much, much more. He maintains that the core fantasy of exploring a new planet was there from the get-go, but the game didn’t look or run quite was well as it did in trailers and plenty of fans said they didn’t get what they expected.

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“When it launched I think two things really motivated us,” he said. “One was that we could see people were playing. The general narrative is that they weren’t, that it’s a dead game, which is so common, but the numbers for us were still very impressive. The average play time was 25 hours at launch across many millions of people.” He said some were playing for just an hour and bailing, others for hundreds.

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The other motivation was to improve the reputation of the team. “The narrative around the game—for all of these games that comes out and act as a lightning rod—is that the team, they were lazy or they made bad decisions or they were dishonest or something like that.” He laughed. “I made bad decisions at times for sure but it really hurt me for the team to have that legacy. They worked so hard.” For most of the game’s development, he said, there were only about six developers on it, somehow putting out this huge game.

These days there are fewer skeptics and more fans of Hello Games, more people appreciative of a team that has proven to be dedicated to improving their work and meeting those original expectations of the game’s hype-heated launch.

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The team at Hello has grown to about 25 people, Murray estimates. They’re split across No Man’s Sky, a different mystery project, and a smaller game called The Last Campfire that Murray hopes will help some of his developers experience the scrappy learning process a smaller Hello Games had when building 2010’s motorcycle stunt game Joe Danger. He believes that experience gave Hello’s early developers the skills to make the grander No Man’s Sky. “We’re losing that in the studio if we don’t keep doing that sort of thing,” he said of making the smaller games. “I don’t want a load of people who haven’t had that experience.”

The Hello team is also relishing the positivity emerging from their big hit. They keep an internal website, Murray said, “where we put all the nice things and the way the game has impacted people.” They hear from people who say the game is meditative and helps them relax. “And so you get a lot of people say it’s helped them through tough times.” They hear from fans who’ve logged 3,000 hours or more and need help fixing their save files or even building a new one. “I don’t want to encourage this as a service we provide but we’ve done things where people will tell us, ‘I had this, this and this on a save and I’ve played so long and I’ve lost it for whatever reason.’ They broke up with their partner or whatever and we’ll just do some debug things to try to rebuild some part of it.”

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“I didn’t think it was a game you would actually play for a thousand hours,” he said. “Two years out, people still care. People still want to sit down and talk about it and play it. That’s a big deal for me. That’s a nice thing for that team.”