It’s really big, very cold and mostly empty, but that hasn’t stopped us populating an entire genre with exciting sims dedicated to exploring and fighting in it over the last forty-or-so years. Human instinct is drawn to discovery, and the vastness of the void creates unlimited opportunities for scope and scale that you just can’t find here on Earth.

The genre has evolved and refined itself over the last four decades, and, despite falling out of mainstream favour over recent years, is now on a major, and very exciting, resurgence. Here are the most important steps in its lengthy history.

Space games existed in some form before A Journey into Space; 1974’s Star Trader was an extremely basic text-based space game, but it wasn’t until a decade later that the genre started to see a real shift forward. A Journey into Space was originally released on the Atari 2600 by Activison and it was one of the first space sims to establish flight mechanics like landing, takeoff, ship stabilisation and more. It was also one of the first games to encompass actual pretty graphics.

Space Shuttle was so deep that it revolutionised the genre and gave it a sense of scope that hadn’t been seen before. It was so popular, in fact, that it was re-released on several machines after the Atari, with Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum versions released in 1984, and two final versions released on the Amstrad and the MSX in 1986. See kids, HD remasters aren’t such a new fad after all!

Ah, Elite. Created back in the 1980s by the revered space-nut-cum-games-developer David Braben, with his good pal Ian Bell, Elite is considered by most to be the seminal space trading simulator. I’m firmly in love with Elite Dangerous thirty years on, but Elite’s rich history is ingrained in the halls of science fiction. It was truly massive back in 1984, with eight whole galaxies each containing 256 planets to explore. All of this was done from the cockpit of the ship, and a lot of the now-iconic features of Elite were established here, including the recognisable scanner that sits in the center of the cockpit’s design.

Elite also experimented with procedural generation, and despite having to downsize the universe at the request of the publisher - mostly to make it less obvious to the player that the computer is generating systems using algorithms - the game was still awe-inspiring to those who played it. Braben and Bell even removed an entire galaxy when they found a planet had been named ‘Arse’ by the game’s random generation technology. It’s difficult to imagine how impressive it must have been considering the progress of games over the last few decades, but Elite is a remarkably important step in the evolution of space games.

Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts called his game “World War 2 in space” and if that’s not a selling point then I’m not sure what is. It’s a game that focuses heavily on combat scenarios, and uses Star Wars as a main influence in bringing the fraught tension of dogfighting to life. It not only made space combat exciting, but it also implemented fresh mechanics to level objectives, adding bonus tasks that net larger rewards when going above and beyond while on a mission.

Released on floppy disc at the start of the 1990s, Wing Commander also spawned a couple of sequels and several add-ons to the main game. These expansions’ fully realised plots kept the game supported for months after release. Wing Commander was a major critical success, too, even earning 6/5 stars in Dragon - the official Dungeons and Dragons magazine - and is regularly considered one of the all-time PC greats. Competition ramped up considerably after its release, leading to contemporaries like LucasArts’ X-Wing.

Shuttle was published by none other than later commercial space flight pioneer Virgin back in the early 1990s. When you look at it now it looks like a very basic version of Kerbal Space Program, but it still packs a considerable amount of depth. From takeoff all the way to re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, Shuttle recreated a lot of the complexity of real cockpits, displaying almost all of the major functions with an array of knobs, buttons and little levers. It was truly incredible. Especially for a game taking up a miniscule amount of space on a floppy disc.

The game was praised for condensing of tons of information into a system that players could learn to understand. Similar to Kerbal, Shuttle also incorporates real life space shuttle missions and other flight tests into its mission structures. The Enterprise flight is a particular highlight, and you even get to run through the launch of the Hubble space telescope, building a space station like the ISS (International Space Station) and more. Shuttle may not have the dogfighting bravado of Wing Commander, but it refined the core simulation mechanics that lie at the heart of the genre.

Despite sounding like a cheesy television show that your parents might have watched in the mid ‘70s, Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space is a two-player strategy game built on the idea of the space race. Playing as either the USA or USSR, each player’s end goal is to make a successful landing on the moon, but the game incorporates many mid-tier objectives on the way to the lunar surface. You control a base station that acts as your hub for missions and other developments, and the game itself takes place across twenty in-game years, from 1957 to 1977.

The game takes great advantage of humanity’s achievements during the Space Race, allowing players to carry out real historic missions on their path towards reaching the moon. It was billed as a game suitable for young children, but drew a fair amount of criticism for being overly complex and difficult to play. Still, that didn’t stop it getting 90/100 from PC Gamer UK, and more recently it received an open source translation from the original creators back in 2005.

At the end of 1993, David Braben’s first Elite sequel hit the Amiga, Atari ST and DOS. It carried over a lot of the ideas that its predecessor established ten years earlier, while expanding the size and taking advantage of the graphical power of new hardware. Frontier continued the Elite staple of allowing players to do whatever they want, focusing mainly on trading to earn money and reputation. There’s almost no plot whatsoever, save for some titbits around the game’s political factions.

Frontier also adheres to Newtonian physics and thus the ship controls are vastly -depth. There’s even an time acceleration feature which allows players to travel between planets and stations within the same system, as well as the classic hyperspace jump. A really cool feature of Frontier is, weirdly enough, its copyright protection - every now and then the game’s security forces will ask you for a certain string of letters from your game manual. If you enter them incorrectly three times in a row, your game ends and that’s that, you can’t play anymore. Tough!

You might not know it but EVE Online is now over a decade old. This super dense, in-depth MMO has had numerous major updates since its release, but it continues to be one of the most complex and engaging space simulators ever made. With its rich player driven economy and some of the largest multiplayer battles ever seen, EVE definitely isn’t for everyone, but invest time into learning some of its incredibly intricate game systems and you’ll become engrossed in arguably the best space MMO ever made.

The game is famous for a lot of really cool events, including one player who offered $500 in real money to anyone who could assassinate a particularly high profile target. A few key, obliging players then spent a year of real-time playing the game, working their way up the ranks of the target’s corporation in order to earn trust and get close. One assassin even managed to reach second in command of the entire organisation. Then, when the moment was right, the assassins struck by killing their target (twice, no less, which means you’re really dead in EVE’s world), stealing valuables and destroying the rest - over $16,500 worth of in-game items were destroyed. They even bagged the $500 bounty.

The first half of this decade has seen a resurgence in the space simulator genre, and Kerbal Space Program has led the charge. Still technically in beta, KSP packs charm and depth using its Kerbals - cute little green humanoids - to provide the character to make your ventures into space feel human and perilous. With so many options for creativity in Kerbal’s tools, any accidents, deaths or abandonments-on-nearby-moons are your fault, but the game constantly pushes you to trial and error until you get it right.

Developer Squad has gone so far in its depiction of authentic space as to involve NASA in its development process, implementing real missions and ships into the game so that you can experiment with real life science. Other space organisations have taken real interest, too, including the Copenhagen Suborbitals, Space X, and the ESA. It’s these kinds of partnerships that really prove the educational and scientific power of video games nowadays, and how space simulators have become important and respected by those outside of the hardcore gaming community.

FTL is the top-down, fast-paced real-time strategy game that turned space simulation into permadeath roguelike, brought it to mobile, and made it endlessly replayable - not to mention furiously addictive. While a lot space games focus on the overall scope of space battles, lasers and explosions, FTL concerns itself with the stressful minutiae of crisis management on a single ship. There’s no maneuvering or aiming going on - FTL just takes the randomness of certain scenarios and forces you to cope against difficult and often insurmountable odds.

The permanent nature of every demise makes it all the more stressful. Permadeath is a risky mechanic to put in a game, often dividing players on whether it’s well executed, but FTL puts it to excellent use. Even when the game feels like it’s beating you up unnecessarily, the unpredictable nature of its mechanics make it easy to pick up and play again, and you rarely see the same scenarios play out again in exactly the same way.

First announced a few years back as David Braben’s next ambitious project, Elite: Dangerous took full advantage of the crowdsourced funding model, using Kickstarter to raise over £1.5m of development budget. Since then it’s raised a lot more cash, and the scope of Dangerous’ vision has expanded as its wallet has bulked out. It’s been a long, lengthy road to release, running through several alpha and beta stages, but developer Frontier has been vigilant in the refinement of its latest game.

Dangerous takes tons of the key elements that made the original Elite games so iconic and frame-shifts them to 21st century standards. The game’s high definition sheen makes its impressive scope even more beautiful - there’s nothing like travelling from a hot white star all the way to a distant gas giant, descending into its icy rings until you’re there in between the trillions of bits of space debris. There’s still a long path of development and expansion ahead of it (with its console debut having just occurred by way of Microsoft’s early access Xbox Game Preview programme), but Elite: Dangerous is arguably the most important space simulator of the last ten years.

No Man’s Sky has had gamers everywhere wetting themselves since it was announced back in 2013. It’s huge - indie developer Hello Games has claimed it’s technically infinite - and is heavily focused on venturing out into the nothing to find weird and wonderful things. Very few details exist about what else you actually do in No Man Sky’s procedurally generated universe, and the studio’s own Sean Murray has been very explicit in not wanting to describe the game’s main objectives because he believes that goes against what the game is about.

Whatever you end up in doing out in the stars, No Man’s Sky is colourful and bold, full of alien spaces and unusual celestial landscapes. It feels like the space simulator’s arcade cousin, and the fact you can travel seamlessly from land before climbing your ship and flying up into space is something especially magical - something even Elite: Dangerous hasn’t managed to implement yet.

With a ludicrous amount of crowd-sourced money in the bank - just under $70 million at last count - Star Citizen is probably the most well-funded space simulator game of all time. It’s definitely the biggest game to ever get funding from Kickstarter. There are a lot of grand promises for Star Citizen being bounded around by its developers, and while they’ve definitely got the money to keep the game in development for a life-time if they need to, all eyes are intently scrutinising whether those promises have substance.

Aside from anticipation for the game, Star Citizen represents something perhaps more important. It raked in tens of millions of fan-donated dollars, and that’s pretty impressive for a game sat within a fairly niche genre which many discounted as near-dead a few years ago. Over the last four decades, space simulators have evolved and refined themselves, coming out in all different shapes and sizes with unique takes on what the genre means and can achieve. The fact we’re at a stage where a single space sim can amass the budget of a blockbuster triple-A title just by asking for it is, frankly, just really bloody cool.

So, E3 happened and, as expected, Fallout 4 dominated proceedings. In the course of two days, we learned more about Bethesda's post-apocalyptic RPG than we have in the course of several years of desperate hunting. Rumours were confirmed, gossip was waved away and, most excitingly, there were some in store, too.

The biggest of all, of course, was the release date. The game will be out in November, bucking the usual E3 trend of a first reveal coming years in advance. Apart from anything else, that means we got trailers, full feature rundowns and huge chunks of gameplay to watch from the get-go - here's everything we know so far.

Our Vault Dwellers have always been the strong, silent types, seemingly communicating all information via telepathy or morse code spelled out by gunshots. This time - whether you play as a male or female character - your character has a . It's apparently taken four years to write and record the 13,000 lines of dialogue required for each character, but producer Todd Howard wanted us to connect with our characters more, and this is the way to do it.

It helps that we'll be designing them to within an inch of their life, too. Far from the buttons and sliders of most RPG character creation sections, Fallout plonks your character in front of a bathroom mirror and lets you literally play with their face until you have it the way you want it. Design their spouse too and the game auto-generates a baby based on your creations. For its final trick, the voice of your Mr. Handy robot can cope with thousands of the world's most popular surnames, meaning you'll be referred to by name as you go. Immersion is the name of the game, seemingly.

This is the one main rumour that proved to be true - Fallout 4's Massachusetts setting is real if a little twisted. The big hitters are all there - there's a settlement inside Fenway Park, and the series has always made reference to M.I.T, now known only as The Institute - but this is an an alternate history, too. Real-life locations that have since been demolished still remain, like the old city centre, Scollay Square.

It's faithful enough that ex-Boston residents working on the game have said it made them homesick - but its the differences to previous games that has us interested. Fallout 4's Boston is significantly more built-up than the Capital Wasteland or New Vegas, with ramshackle skyscrapers and busy settlements popping up across the game trailers. Does that mean this game is set a fair bit later than either of the last two games?

"I'll be playing the game and run into something and be like, 'Who built this? What is this? It's so big!'" So says Todd Howard, a man supposedly overseeing the game. If he's not seen it all, what chance do we have? The focus clearly seems to be on building a world that offers up the kind of stories we can swap with friends, one of Bethesda's chief talents - and in that respect.

We've not had any official word on exactly how big it is, but screenshots show off far more than simple urban wastes, and lead producer, Jeff Gardiner, summed it up by saying "I've played the game probably 400 hours, and I'm still finding stuff that I haven't seen yet." Get working on some thumb calluses - we're going for a virtual hike.

First up, you start the game pre-war. You know those old trailers for Fallout that showed the '50s techno-Americana bliss before the bombs dropped - you're living it. For a bit. Soon, you're running for the familiar environs of a vault (number 111 in this case) and a mushroom cloud signals the end of taht chapter.

I assumed that that meant you'd end up playing as the auto-generated baby mentioned earlier. Nope. As it turns out, your chosen character survives in their vault for 200 years. No one else does. Presumably, this will be the thrust of the storyline - working out just what Vault-Tec did to keep you from dying (or aging), while your spouse and child didn't make it. Fun!

That's not to say you'll be alone. The entire first trailer made it pretty clear that true series hero, Dogmeat, will be playing a major role. I'm guessing this is a different abandoned Alsatian to the one that glitched out and disappeared in my Fallout 3 save file (although in a game where someone can live for 200 years and come out of it a bit groggy, who knows) - it's certainly a more useful version.

Dogmeat can now take more advanced orders, attacking or distracting enemies, fetching items you can't be bothered to schlep over to and, most importantly, meaning I won't have to stop playing to have a bit of a cry at any point.

Fallout 3 ran on the Gamebryo engine. That was modified and re-released as the Creation engine for the release of Skyrim. Fallout 4, which has apparently been in development since 2009, runs on its own version of Creation. Bethesda, it seems, does not like change.

That's not to say that it'll feel like an old game. It's clear enough from the trailers that significant work has gone into the lighting and animation style, while the face-to-face, zombie-like conversations of old are out completely. Facial expressions are far more complex, and the conversation system is dynamic, not only letting you see the scene in third-person, but even break off to run away or attack your unsuspecting talking partner.

Fallout always did a (slightly) better job than its fantasy equivalents at using junk items in meaningful ways - and yes, the Rock-It Launcher returns, thankfully - but Bethesda's collection of inventory ephemera gains new purpose with the addition of a huge new crafting system.

Every weapon and armour set can be added to, altered and made to look significantly more badass with the application of a plethora of junk. How toy rockets are being used to create a sturdier rifle stock is never fully explained, but we'll be happy just to trade in a hundred broomsticks for some discernible reason, thank you very much.

Certain plots of land in the game can be used to create full settlements, from scratch. Think of it like the building system of a game like Rust, but with way> fewer penises. Build it, and wasteland inhabitants will come - the more you offer to passers-by, the more they'll want to set up shop (if they're rare items merchants, sometimes literally).

But the bigger you build, the more of a target you become. You'll need to set up defenses (including stringing powerlines around from generators) to, er, dissuade raiders from stealing your stff and killing your new citizens. But it's worth it - build more than one settlement and you can mogul it up by sending trade caravans between your towns.

Fallout's never taken itself too seriously - expect 4 to follow suit. Even without whatever the inevitable Wild Wasteland perk brings with it, we've already spotted the obligatory nuke launcher, rideable Vertibirds, airstrikes, jetpacks, and baseball bats with buzzsaw blades strapped to the end.

Best of all, your Pip-Boy's now an in-game console of its own - you'll be finding, let's say, familiar retro games to play on your green and black display. The original Donkey Kong featuring a Pipboy player-character, the slightly eerie inclusion of Missile Commander and more will be appearing.

The biggest surprise of all was that Fallout's incredible mod community will be getting a much bigger audience this time around. Todd Howard confirmed that will be able to download mods made for the PC version of the game first, with PS4 to follow suit later.

There's no word on exactly how this will be done - I'd guess at a pool of approved mods, but even without the truly outlandish stuff, that's a huge step towards keeping Fallout a going concern on console for years to come.

So, E3 happened and, as expected, Fallout 4 dominated proceedings. In the course of two days, we learned more about Bethesda's post-apocalyptic RPG than we have in the course of several years of desperate hunting. Rumours were confirmed, gossip was waved away and, most excitingly, there were some real surprises in store, too.

The biggest of all, of course, was the release date. The game will be out in November, bucking the usual E3 trend of a first reveal coming years in advance. Apart from anything else, that means we got trailers, full feature rundowns and huge chunks of gameplay to watch from the get-go - here's everything we know so far.

Our Vault Dwellers have always been the strong, silent types, seemingly communicating all information via telepathy or morse code spelled out by gunshots. This time - whether you play as a male or female character - your character has a . It's apparently taken four years to write and record the 13,000 lines of dialogue required for each character, but producer Todd Howard wanted us to connect with our characters more, and this is the way to do it.

It helps that we'll be designing them to within an inch of their life, too. Far from the buttons and sliders of most RPG character creation sections, Fallout plonks your character in front of a bathroom mirror and lets you literally play with their face until you have it the way you want it. Design their spouse too and the game auto-generates a baby based on your creations. For its final trick, the voice of your Mr. Handy robot can cope with thousands of the world's most popular surnames, meaning you'll be referred to by name as you go. Immersion is the name of the game, seemingly.

This is the one main rumour that proved to be true - Fallout 4's Massachusetts setting is real if a little twisted. The big hitters are all there - there's a settlement inside Fenway Park, and the series has always made reference to M.I.T, now known only as The Institute - but this is an an alternate history, too. Real-life locations that have since been demolished still remain, like the old city centre, Scollay Square.

It's faithful enough that ex-Boston residents working on the game have said it made them homesick - but its the differences to previous games that has us interested. Fallout 4's Boston is significantly more built-up than the Capital Wasteland or New Vegas, with ramshackle skyscrapers and busy settlements popping up across the game trailers. Does that mean this game is set a fair bit later than either of the last two games?

"I'll be playing the game and run into something and be like, 'Who built this? What is this? It's so big!'" So says Todd Howard, a man supposedly overseeing the game. If he's not seen it all, what chance do we have? The focus clearly seems to be on building a world that offers up the kind of stories we can swap with friends, one of Bethesda's chief talents - and in that respect.

We've not had any official word on exactly how big it is, but screenshots show off far more than simple urban wastes, and lead producer, Jeff Gardiner, summed it up by saying "I've played the game probably 400 hours, and I'm still finding stuff that I haven't seen yet." Get working on some thumb calluses - we're going for a virtual hike.

First up, you start the game pre-war. You know those old trailers for Fallout that showed the '50s techno-Americana bliss before the bombs dropped - you're living it. For a bit. Soon, you're running for the familiar environs of a vault (number 111 in this case) and a mushroom cloud signals the end of taht chapter.

I assumed that that meant you'd end up playing as the auto-generated baby mentioned earlier. Nope. As it turns out, your chosen character survives in their vault for 200 years. No one else does. Presumably, this will be the thrust of the storyline - working out just what Vault-Tec did to keep you from dying (or aging), while your spouse and child didn't make it. Fun!

That's not to say you'll be alone. The entire first trailer made it pretty clear that true series hero, Dogmeat, will be playing a major role. I'm guessing this is a different abandoned Alsatian to the one that glitched out and disappeared in my Fallout 3 save file (although in a game where someone can live for 200 years and come out of it a bit groggy, who knows) - it's certainly a more useful version.

Dogmeat can now take more advanced orders, attacking or distracting enemies, fetching items you can't be bothered to schlep over to and, most importantly, is totally invincible meaning I won't have to stop playing to have a bit of a cry at any point.

Fallout 3 ran on the Gamebryo engine. That was modified and re-released as the Creation engine for the release of Skyrim. Fallout 4, which has apparently been in development since 2009, runs on its own version of Creation. Bethesda, it seems, does not like change.

That's not to say that it'll feel like an old game. It's clear enough from the trailers that significant work has gone into the lighting and animation style, while the face-to-face, zombie-like conversations of old are out completely. Facial expressions are far more complex, and the conversation system is dynamic, not only letting you see the scene in third-person, but even break off to run away or attack your unsuspecting talking partner.

Fallout always did a (slightly) better job than its fantasy equivalents at using junk items in meaningful ways - and yes, the Rock-It Launcher returns, thankfully - but Bethesda's collection of inventory ephemera gains new purpose with the addition of a huge new crafting system.

Every weapon and armour set can be added to, altered and made to look significantly more badass with the application of a plethora of junk. How toy rockets are being used to create a sturdier rifle stock is never fully explained, but we'll be happy just to trade in a hundred broomsticks for some discernible reason, thank you very much.

Certain plots of land in the game can be used to create full settlements, from scratch. Think of it like the building system of a game like Rust, but with way> fewer penises. Build it, and wasteland inhabitants will come - the more you offer to passers-by, the more they'll want to set up shop (if they're rare items merchants, sometimes literally).

But the bigger you build, the more of a target you become. You'll need to set up defenses (including stringing powerlines around from generators) to, er, dissuade raiders from stealing your stff and killing your new citizens. But it's worth it - build more than one settlement and you can mogul it up by sending trade caravans between your towns.

Fallout's never taken itself too seriously - expect 4 to follow suit. Even without whatever the inevitable Wild Wasteland perk brings with it, we've already spotted the obligatory nuke launcher, rideable Vertibirds, airstrikes, jetpacks, and baseball bats with buzzsaw blades strapped to the end.

Best of all, your Pip-Boy's now an in-game console of its own - you'll be finding, let's say, familiar retro games to play on your green and black display. The original Donkey Kong featuring a Pipboy player-character, the slightly eerie inclusion of Missile Commander and more will be appearing.

The biggest surprise of all was that Fallout's incredible mod community will be getting a much bigger audience this time around. Todd Howard confirmed that Xbox One players will be able to download mods made for the PC version of the game first, with PS4 to follow suit later.

There's no word on exactly how this will be done - I'd guess at a pool of approved mods, but even without the truly outlandish stuff, that's a huge step towards keeping Fallout a going concern on console for years to come.