No Man’s Sky: the game where you can explore 18 quintillion planets

It's a game where you're unlikely to meet other players, no one will win and it will take over four billion years to explore it all. And that's why it's the most anticipated title for decades.

Sean Murray is sweating in an Uber cab as it lurches to the staccato rhythm of Los Angeles traffic. The 34-year-old video game programmer is anxious. His meeting at SpaceX with Elon Musk, the American business magnate who hopes to put a human on Mars within the next two decades, overran and Murray and two of his colleagues are perilously late for their next appointment. It is, if not the most important meeting of his life, then almost certainly the most notable (and this in a week of notable meetings; before Musk, Murray met the rapper Kanye West). In five minutes Murray and his colleague, David Ream, are due to show No Man's Sky, the video game he and a dozen or so friends are creating half a world away in Guildford, to the film director Steven Spielberg.

Like Murray, Spielberg is in town for E3, the video game industry's largest annual gathering, held in boiling LA each June, where publishers show off their forthcoming titles to baying crowds of fans. The cab pulls up at the Los Angeles Convention Centre, where the event takes place over three days. The building is draped in advertising for next year's blockbuster titles. Murray exits the car with a slam and begins to weave through the crowd, clustered around screens and fingerprint-smeared controllers. He arrives at one of Sony's cool private meeting rooms, just as Spielberg and his entourage arrive. Inside, Murray, with an apologetic press of a button, loads up the universe.