Hello Games Says It Didn’t Call No Man’s Sky a Mistake

First, indie sci-fi survival sandbox No Man’s Sky was in my view definitely not a mistake, and you can read why I think so here. But second, and of more immediate importance, it seems a troll (or trolls) managed to hack into Hello Games’ backend to launch a bit of Internet drama this morning. It started with a tweet from the studio’s official Twitter account that read “No Man’s Sky was a mistake.”

Weirdness ensued. News sites ran briefs noting the tweet’s existence. The tweet mysteriously disappeared less than a dozen minutes after it emerged, deleted, while Hello Games’ Twitter account transitioned to protected status. Emails purporting to be from Hello Games’ founder Sean Murray, the game’s most visible face in the lead up to the game’s release in August, appeared on news sites, and seemed to corroborate the bizarrely confessional sounding one-liner.

But not long thereafter, the Twitter account Murray himself uses (and which hadn’t been active since Aug. 18) tweeted that the studio’s server had been hacked.

And then he added that the ingress point was LinkedIn.

That was followed by Hello Games lowering its Twitter shields, and tweeting:

It’s still not clear exactly what happened and why, but absent independent confirmation from Hello Games, it certainly appears to be the work of Internet hobgoblins looking to stir things up. Critically well-received, No Man’s Sky was targeted upon release by vitriolic players who believed the studio misled buyers, and that Murray himself had promised features the final game didn’t include. The accuracy of those beliefs aside, today’s imbroglio is another object lesson in why measured skepticism should be the only bullet chambered when anomalous stories like this appear.