There was originally supposed to be a ‘much bigger’ reveal of Light No Fire: here’s why Sean Murray changed his mind

It’s been close to three years since we saw the announcement teaser for Light No Fire, the next game from No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games. Studio founder Sean Murray spoke to PC Gamer last week in conjunction with No Man’s Sky’s 10th anniversary, and I naturally had to ask if we might see more of Light No Fire before the end of the year.

Turns out, we almost got to see more of Light No Fire a couple of years ago at Summer Game Fest 2024, but the circumstances surrounding that first brief teaser changed Murray’s mind.

“I did have a plan, and I thought, we’ll tease it with 90 seconds, and then we’ll show it again at [SGF], probably, and I had a much bigger thing that I wanted to show about the game to really explain what the game was,” Murray said. “Because I don’t think we necessarily have shown the vision or the ambition of the game, but I thought this will be a cool tease, and then we’ll show some more.”

The reason we didn’t get more, somewhat ironically, is that everyone liked what they saw. Liked it a little too much, maybe.

“The reality is, it was incredibly popular,” Murray said. “We just shot up like the Steam wish list charts. There’s, like, 20 million views on that tease. We’re the number two game on the [Steam] wishlist.

“All of that, and given our past, made us feel like, okay, we don’t need to say anything more right now. And our attitude in general is to avoid saying anything to the press or outwardly unless we really, really need to, and sort of let the game do the talking.”

While he won’t show it to us yet, Murray told me he’d played Light No Fire earlier that day.

“What I’m looking at on screen is way, way beyond what any normal studio would have and not have shown more of it to the rest of the world,” he said. “We’re lucky from that point of view. We can kind of just keep [it] to ourselves, keep working on what we’re enjoying, and not have to spend our time marketing and hyping and showing the game to people.”

As for my original question, whether or not we might see some more of Light No Fire before the end of the year… well, the answer probably won’t surprise you.

“I’ve learned the very, very hard way to not talk about anything ahead of time,” Murray said. “And our attitude in general is to avoid saying anything to the press or outwardly unless we really, really need to.”