What does this mean for similar titles down the road? Consider how certain genre-breakers have beget beloved titles in the industry.

Interactive drama: Telltale’s The Walking Dead caught everyone off guard. Less a traditional adventure title and more a high-stakes Choose Your Own Adventure, it took the concept birthed by Heavy Rain and made it its own. This genre propagated forward thanks to Telltale’s own catalog, and other developers have run with it. Without Telltale’s groundbreaking title, we wouldn’t have the brilliant Life is Strange or Until Dawn—both key works that showcase how a core concept is malleable to fit a unique vision.

First-person experiences: Similarly, Portal 2 created a shift in puzzle-based games, taking them from mini-games in larger titles (which, as a spin-off of Half Life, was kind of what the original Portal was) to larger titles with complex narratives and full environments. In the same way, Gone Home established the model for so-called walking simulators, where guided exploration allows a narrative to unfold. Without Gone Home, we wouldn’t have experiences such as Firewatch, or the crossover of first-person puzzle games and walking simulators such as The Talos Principle or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

From genre-defining experiences like Gone Home and The Walking Dead came new ideas, new paradigms, and new ways to evolve a genre’s particular tropes as technology and platform pushed forward. No Man’s Sky is the first of its kind, a remarkable title that is vast enough to sustain the beauty of exploration without the need for combat, story, or competition. What might other developers do with this idea? Consider the fact that Hello Games has less than 20 people—then compare that with the hundreds of people who work on something like an Assassin’s Creed title. With budget, size, and technology—particularly emerging VR and AR technology—immersive moments that create the impossible experience is something within reach of visionary developers.

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