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.

Doom's demons are what make the series work. Sure, sprinting around a space station with a Super Shotgun in hand is thrilling, but if you don't have interesting targets to blast into a cloud of gore, what's the point? The minions of Hell are what give Doom its spicy, pulse-quickening flavor, with designs that are both threatening and intriguing. You have to remember that, for many gamers, Doom was their first-ever exposure to first-person shooting - and its enemies are what made the experience so profoundly vivifying. As you viciously unload clip after clip into hordes of growling Hellspawn, you're getting a subtle crash course in the core dynamics of the entire FPS genre.

After seeing the recent . And many of those demons stand the test of time, re-emerging in the new Doom with their designs - in both form and function - surprisingly intact. We'll be sure to add more returning enemy types as they surface with fresh Doom details; for now, enjoy this retrospective of Doom's demonic bestiary, from the original games to Doom 64, Doom 3, and the upcoming fourth entry in id's legendary franchise.

These slain-then-reanimated space marines are the perfect introduction to Doom's crusade of carnage; as the very first enemy you encounter, they convey a massive amount of information about this virtual world. Their human frames evoke the Nazis of Wolfenstein 3D, and as with mowing down the SS, their undead status enables guilt-free genocide. But the Zombieman's guttural, beast-like growls and groans of pain are much more alarming than any German exclamations, commanding your attention while still acting as the most minimal, easily handled threat in the game. And seeing them in-fight when one of their ranks engages in friendly fire is utterly mesmerizing (and advantageous).

Doom 3 stumbles because it tries to put more focus on jump-scare-enabling civilian zombies lurching at you from the darkness, instead of the rare undead soldier who can actually shoot back. Turns out, the original Zombieman is the perfect embodiment of a minor, retaliating threat. These grunts are easily killed, but still problematic when ignored. In that regard, the new Doom's design - complete with its 'body horror' arm-cannons - seems like it'll carry the torch of the traditional Zombieman nicely.

The Imp's importance to Doom's fundamentals cannot be overstated. As the second enemy type you encounter after the Zombieman (still in the opening level, mind you), Imps are your first real taste of the supernatural horror that awaits on the rest of Mars. Their spiky bodies and propensity to fling fireballs clearly signal that yes, these are the armies of Hell walking in your presence. And those fireballs are an ingenious teaching method: they force you to learn how to strafe out of harm's way or suffer third-degree burns. Unlike the Zombieman's bullets, Imps' projectiles present visually distinct hazards, which fly just fast enough to test your twitch reflexes without being imperceptible.

Doom 3 tweaks that design slightly, giving Imps the ability to climb along walls, and bolstering their trademark fireball flinging with a pounce attack that's much more aggressive than the original's 'slowly waddle towards you to get within punching range'. The new Doom looks like it'll retain Doom 3's springy, more agile Imp design, acting as a barometer for the player's ability to dodge out of the way of incoming ranged or melee attacks at a moment's notice.

These beasties are actually just 'Demons', but most everyone calls 'em Pinkies - partially because of the pig-like pigmentation of their flesh, but mostly because Pinky is an infinitely more delightful name. Just as Zombiemen and Imps embody invaluable FPS intelligence, the Pinky introduces fledgling players to a new kind of threat: the bullet sponge that rushes in your direction until one of you is dead. One Pinky is reason to be afraid; a pack of them indicates that it's time to either run away or carefully use the environment to funnel them into a manageable procession towards the warm, welcoming barrel of your Super Shotgun.

I guess a bright pink bipedal demon felt too outlandish to be a part of Doom 3, so the classic Pinky got replaced by a four-legged, dog-like meld of demon flesh and robotic hind legs. But id and Bethesda seem to have heard my nightly prayers, having restored my most beloved Hellspawn buddy to his rightful form in the new Doom. Forgive the blurriness of the image - that bad boy only shows up for a fraction of a second in the most recent Doom gameplay trailer - but this is clearly a modernized version of the charming goofiness inherent to the Pinky's original look.

For most people, the sight of a naked, grotesquely obese man with elephant legs is not their idea of a good time. Turns out, it's even worse when they've got two rocket launchers for arms and a limitless supply of ammunition. Fighting the Mancubus is the organic tutorial to the ins and outs of splash damage, given how it fights with - and is easily killed by - rockets. The concept of extra damage invisibly radiating out from a rocket's point of impact is a basic FPS principle we know and love now, but in Doom's day, it was a principle had to be learned.

It becomes apparent - probably after a few instances of kamikaze-esque self-disintegration - that trying to blast a Mancubus with rockets from point-blank will kill the both of you in a hurry. Best to plug its rippling belly with some shotgun or chaingun rounds, saving those rockets for rooms full of lesser enemies. The new Doom gives you another option: set it up for a melee execution with a few potshots, then force-feed it its own explosive heart for gut-busting results.

Fun fact: the original Cacodemon design is heavily based on from a Dungeons and Dragons manual (which I highly doubt id ever paid royalties for). Cacodemons are like Imps on steroids, spewing fireballs at a faster rate and surviving way more punishment. The Cacodemon's cyclopean glowing eye, ominous blue-mouthed grin, and sheer size - often taking up a huge chunk of your screen - can make even the hardiest space marine freeze in terror at first sight. But doing so ensures certain death, so you're forced to adapt. After slaying your first bushel of bulbous Cacodemons, you'll realize that you've been honing the skills needed to down these big red blimps just by mowing down the previous enemy types.

Like the Imp, the Cacodemon's ranged attacks often force you to backpedal while shooting, which becomes an invaluable tactic for any firefight the more you get used to it. But their hovering freedom of movement also trains you to keep your eyes peeled for any overhead threats that could swiftly close the distance on you. The new Doom's slightly smaller Cacodemon appears to patrol the skies in much the same way, and will hopefully cave in and collapse into a pile of intestines upon death (just like the original).

These resilient brutes are available in two flavors: the tan-skinned Hell Knight, or the pink, beefed-up (and doubled-up) Baron of Hell. Either way, you're going to have a tough time dealing with their massive health pools, ranged fireballs (this time in lime green), and devastating wallops up close. Besting them is a matter of preparedness, because if your ammo supply isn't well-stocked when a Hell Knight rolls up, the fight will be over before it's even begun.

The Hell Knight is undoubtedly the most iconic monster in Doom 3 (appearing front and center on the box art), with a muscular, hulking redesign that looks like it could crush the original goat-man sprite with a single swipe. Doom 4 repurposes this design with a cleaner, bone-colored noggin, while maintaining the Herculean physiques. This new breed of Hell Knight seems to have a bigger focus on melee aggression, but granted, that's judging based off a single fight scene (and I definitely spotted up some charged-up energy in its hands at one point).

Revenants are something of an anomaly: an enemy that's just as deadly from afar as it is up close. Those twin shoulder-mounted rockets aren't just for show, and can obliterate your health from long range, but the Revenant will gladly punch you to death if you try for some close-quarters combat. Engaging them can be a frustrating experience at first, as you desperately try to figure out the most effective distance to mount your attack.

Then comes an epiphany, the kind that can only arise from brilliant game design: you need to confuse the Revenant by dancing between its two attack ranges, like a boxer darting away from and into dangerous punches at just the right moment. Of course, you'll need to be fast if you want to survive, because it can easily match your pace with its speedy footwork. And judging by the grisly ending to the fresh Doom gameplay reveal from E3 2015, the Revenant's more than happy to tear off your arms and beat you to death with them. Just something to keep in mind.

If Doom's bestiary is like a lesson plan, then the Cyberdemon is your final exam. This colossal, rocket-armed, cyborg minotaur has it all: the deadly projectiles of the Mancubus, the erratic zig-zaggy movement of a Pinky, the imposing size of two Cacodemons stacked atop one another, the speed of a Revenant, and the immense survivability of a Hell Knight. Oh, and it doesn't take splash damage, so you can just forget about spamming your stash of rockets and calling it a day.

But then, taking down a Cyberdemon should never be easy, given that it's typically been given final boss status throughout the series. It's an iconic-enough enemy to have been the first actual 'thing' revealed for the new Doom, so it'll be interesting to see if it's used sparingly or becomes a more common, less demanding encounter (hopefully the former). Either way, hearing the Cyberdemon's battle-scream in-game is sure to make your teeth grit, fingers sweat, and intestines quiver each and every time.