NASA Creates Online Video Game

“Astronaut: Moon, Mars & Beyond” is the name of the new game that will be created by NASA. The American space agency has already assigned Virtual Heroes, Project Whitecard and Information in Place as the lead developers of the new massively multiplayer online video game (MMO). Upon reaching to the gaming community for a feedback on its plan, the agency received more than 800 pages of replies in a very short period of time, most saying that fun needed to be the key element of the game, and that officials had to realize the importance of letting professional game developers in charge of the project.

And, apparently, they did. NASA has recently announced that a playable demo of the new game will be most likely available before the end of the year. “The single biggest point that was pushed forward by the game community was that you have to let game design lead the development. It's easy to build a game that's no fun. It's hard to build a game that's successful and fun,” NASA Learning Technologies project manager Daniel Laughlin, who works at the Goddard Earth Science and Technology Center in Maryland, said.

Based on Epic's Unreal Engine 3, “Astronaut: Moon, Mars & Beyond” will be more oriented on player cooperation than on space battles. “We've had to create a new genre of gameplay, creating what we call first person exploration,” the founder and CEO of Virtual Heroes, Jerry Heneghan, shared. Rather than taking on the roles of marines or snipers, such as in other titles of the genre, players of NASA's new game will be roboticists, working together to ensure the success of various space missions.

“This model has been proven with America's Army. The difference here is that we're talking about first person exploration, so it's all about exploring the environment, expanding and building things rather than shooting other players,” Heneghan added for Space. His company has already collaborated with the US Department of Defense (DoD) for the development of the Army's ever-growing free online game.

Players will also reportedly be able to bring their contribution to it, by building various new classes of ships, or by discovering new avenues for space exploration. “I'm working with NASA and video games at the same. It's the coolest job in the world,” Laughlin revealed.