You could argue that the best way to play Fallout is to go in completely blind. It puts you in step with the character you're playing, who very likely just stumbled out of the darkness of a recently opened Vault, blinking in the harsh light of a hellish desert landscape. But at the same time, you're probably already going to be uncomfortable and confused enough about what's right in front of you, never quite sure what to expect until whatever you weren't expecting is pointing a gun at your face. Wouldn't it at least be nice to know what turned the entire world into sunscorched badlands? Why you were locked in a vault in the first place? And how a parody of Coca-Cola almost managed to outlive humanity?

If a history of the world according to Fallout is what you crave, then you've come to the right place. Here you'll find an explanation of what happened to the world to make it so damn crummy, according to the haphazard historians of Fallout. Let it be a guide for you, and a lesson for all of humanity: seriously, don't mess with nukes.

Up until 1961, the history of the world according to Fallout falls in line with the version you probably already know - agriculture was established, all the same revolutions happened, World War 1 came and went, and World War 2 ended with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945. The first real sign of a timeline shift happened in 1961: Carl Bell's space flight in the Defiance 7 on May 5, making him the first human being to leave the Earth's atmosphere before his death upon re-entry.

That might sound like a bit of historical minutia that you forgot from high school history class, but I assure you it isn't, because Carl Bell doesn't exist. The first person in space was actually Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 16, 1961, but in the Fallout timeline his flight never occurred. In addition, NASA and Apollo 11 (the first manned lunar lander ridden by Neil Armstrong) don't exist, and in their place stands the United States Space Administration and Valiant 11. America still lands a man on the moon, but not before…

If Carl Bell is the rumbling on the rail tracks of time, the break-up of the United States is the speeding train that smashes through history as we know it and scatters it about the countryside. In the midst of the Cold War and the Red Scare, the United States takes drastic steps to secure itself against a Communist takeover, which culminates in the country being split into thirteen separate pieces.

This is initially a restructuring tactic, dividing the country so each region is better served by the glory of capitalism and is therefore less likely to fall to the Communist menace. However, with limited resources at the federal government's disposal, the commonwealths quickly turn to infighting as a means to secure their own self-interest. So begins nearly a century of scrambling for special attention from the country's highest authority, which intensifies as oil reserves start to dry up.

In a bid to avoid the look of human androids that trip straight into uncanny valley, General Atomics International releases the Mister Handy line of robot workmen, which look like a mix between an octopus and the thing you thought was hiding under your bed as a child. With twice the rocket propulsion and four times the dapper charm of a regular human, the Mister Handy line becomes one of the highest selling brands of robot butler in the US and Mexico, where they are widely embraced by the average family.

The Mister Handy's popularity leads to the construction of various models such as the Godfrey, the Wadsworth, and the Codsworth. These models run on nuclear power and are self-repairing, making them perfect stewards for humanity in the event of an unforeseen nuclear incident. Ahem.

A day spent worrying about a nuke crashing through your roof will leave you parched, so the American population was more than ready for a symbol of glorious, refreshing capitalism to wash their worries away. Thus comes the invention of Nuka Cola, a carbonated blend of twelve different fruits, in 2044.

The flavor of Nuka Cola changes noticeably that same year with the coming of the Great Passion Fruit Famine, which necessitates the removal of one key ingredient. However, fans quickly adjust to the new taste, and Nuka Cola becomes the most popular brand of soda in the country in a short period of time. Within 25 years, a Nuka Cola vending machine can be found on virtually every American street-corner, and the associated bottle caps become commonplace trash.

Nearly 100 years after oil supplies first became scarce, America takes decisive (and divisive) action by ignoring alternative forms of energy and instead invading Mexico. After years of pressuring its southern neighbor to ramp up oil production to meet ever-increasing demand, the United States occupies Mexico under the guise of stabilizing its government and preventing the spread of pollution to US soil.

Unable to combat the military power of the US, Mexico is eventually tapped of natural resources as they're funneled across the northern border. It is believed that resulting food shortages eventually affect supplies in the US and leads to riots in Denver, Colorado, but this remains unconfirmed.

As a lack of oil finally leads to a global panic, the Resource Wars begin and various nations do battle for what remains. The Europe Commonwealth (European Union was a close second in the name selection race), responds to dwindling oil supplies in the Middle East with a full-scale invasion. Tel Aviv is destroyed by terrorist operatives as the region destabilizes, and localized, small-scale nuclear strikes commence. The United Nations, unable to control the volatile political situation, collapses entirely. The US starts encroaching into an otherwise neutral Canada, and no one knows what happened to Australia.

In the midst of this political turmoil, Chinese spies infiltrate a military lab located at the Hoover Dam and steal a sample of a volatile biological agent known as Limit 115. The vials are shattered in a public square in Denver, leading to the spread of a mutant virus called the New Plague. 200,000 people succumb to the disease in Colorado alone; the US government calls for a national quarantine, and advises American citizens to avoid ice cream socials.

As part of a program called Operation: Safehouse, the government commissions a company called Vault-Tec to construct 122 public fallout shelters called Vaults to protect the people of America in the event of a nuclear attack. Equipped to maintain a human population for up to 900 years while the surface world heals, most are outfitted with expansive living quarters, gardens, and water treatment plants. As the threat of nuclear war diminishes in the minds of the populace, some Vaults see critical life-support systems sacrificed to create luxury rooms, such as .

Unfortunately the US government isn't actually full of benevolent philanthropists interested in the safety of the civilian population. Rather, most Vaults are staging grounds for elaborate social experiments to determine the best course of action for superior specimens (e.g. members of the US government and their descendants, later known as the Enclave) to repopulate the world. The results are, for example, Vaults designed to separate people into clans, or expose them to radiation, or create a society made exclusively of children governed by a robot nanny. All Vaults are monitored by overseers that transmit resulting data directly to Enclave headquarters.

While the world had plenty of futuristic shed-sized supercomputers before 2059, this is the year that the first true artificial intelligence came into existence. The exact nature of the unit is unknown, as the records of its creation are lost in the years that follow, but it's possibly a late model in the ZAX line of learning computers (which are known for achieving self-awareness and cheating at chess, though not necessarily in that order). It could even specifically be John Henry Eden, a self-made ZAX unit programmed to store data on the history of America, who constructs a personality and history based on former American leaders. He later becomes the self-proclaimed President of the United States.

This revelation leads to the refinement of artificial intelligence, resulting in the creation of androids and sentient computer helpers for everyday use. Some eventually become so realistic that it is difficult to discern whether or not they're human, even to the androids themselves.

After draining the Middle East oil reserves and not recovering enough fuel to meet demand, the European Commonwealth dissolves. The remaining concentrations of humanity form nation-states battling over what was once the coalition's resources.

With one major global region locked in a vicious civil war and no significant political maneuvering from the USSR, South America, Africa, or Australia, the United States and the People's Republic of China continue to expand military operations without resistance. An ever-increasing demand for oil from both nations strains international diplomacy.

As construction concludes on the first set of public Vaults, regular evacuation drills become common throughout the United States. While this is purportedly a safety precaution taken with the interest of protecting the general public, the 122 Vaults under construction are not sufficient to house more than a small portion of the population. Optimal candidates for Vault placement are chosen and quietly informed of their inclusion in the program.

The frequency of drills increases over time, which leads to a steady decrease in emergency evacuation attendance. Citizens assume that all uses of the air raid warning system will signal additional drills, and find better things to do with their time.

In a valiant effort to keep its infrastructure from collapsing due to a lack of fuel, China adopts a two-pronged approach, seeking out a deep-sea oil reserve in the Pacific Ocean and negotiating with the United States to establish trade. However, when America refuses to part with its oil and sabotages China's excavation operations, China launches a full-scale assault on the oil-rich Alaska.

Despite heavy American fortifications, China takes Anchorage and the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, securing America's sole domestic oil supply (after the collapse of the withered husk of what was once Texas). In an effort to push back Chinese forces, the United States government commissions ungainly but highly effective power armor suits for all soldiers on the Anchorage front line. However, further complications develop when Canadian forces, drained by American demands for supplies and access to Canadian lands, attack the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline in a bid to bring the conflict to an end.

In a calculated maneuver to show Canada it really shouldn’t have done that, the United States forcibly annexes its northern neighbor. Civil rights are suspended within the newly claimed territory and resistance groups are executed en masse.

Images of America's war crimes are broadcast in the United States, spurring unrest and rebellion. The occupation continues until, drained of resources and nearly conquered in its entirety, Canada cedes to America's demands for annexation.

Seven years after sabotaging China's Pacific excavation operation and claiming the world's last untapped oil reserve, the United States government entrusts fuel giant Poseidon Oil with the construction of a state of the art drilling rig. Ostensibly a show of America's dominance and (heavily disputed) claim to the oil, the rig is also meant as an isolated base of operations for the Enclave, from which they can direct Vaults and still guarantee survival in the event of a nuclear strike.

While the rig is suitable as a fallout shelter, the Enclave's end goal is to eventually repopulate the mainland or, in the event of total destruction of the livable environment, find a new planet to colonize in the vast reaches of space. To that end, the Enclave captures the Bloomfield Space Center in 2076 and seizes the Hermes-13 space shuttle. However, they are unable to properly operate the ship, and this second phase is abandoned.

Despite assuring the American people that the war with China (and all associated resource loss and crimes against humanity) is strictly a defensive effort, the US government directs a sizeable force to the Chinese mainland. Military campaigns are conducted in the Gobi Desert and on the Yangtze River, but American forces are eventually bogged down in the mainland, further draining domestic resources. However, a delivery of top of the line T-51b power armor (which ) turns the tide of the offensive, giving American forces the strength to advance through China and conquer Nanjing and Shanghai.

Meanwhile, all Chinese-Americans living in the United States are shipped to a concentration camp known as Little Yangtze in the Southwest commonwealth, previously southern California and Nevada. Few records from the period survive, but those that do detail horrific military experiments.

The Enclave shadow government orders defense contractor West Tek to fashion a biological agent to immunize American soldiers against any possible contagion, in an effort to safeguard the troops and cure the New Plague (though really more the former than the latter). Early tests of the Pan-Immunity Virion Project result in animal specimens with drastically increased muscle mass and brain activity; the aim of the project immediately shifts to the creation of super soldiers and is moved to a secret military installation in Mariposa, California.

The resulting virus is renamed the Forced Evolution Virus (or F.E.V.), and regular testing begins on military personnel. However, when the project's directive is leaked to soldiers guarding the base, the garrison mutinies, executes the researchers, and declares that Mariposa has seceded from the union. This further destabilizes the already crumbling U.S. military, stretched thin by a two-front war and unable to quell riots and demonstrations amongst the civilian population.

Though it is uncertain where the war's first shot originated (though there are strong guesses to be made), the presence of an unmarked nuclear warhead, en route to an undisclosed target leads to full-scale military strikes by the United States, China, and the USSR, all launching their nuclear payload simultaneously. The two-hour volley is so energy-intense that it reshapes the Earth's geography, altering the movement of its tectonic plates, evaporating or poisoning water sources, and drastically altering the planet's climate by launching debris into the atmosphere.

Humanity is virtually annihilated in what is later described as a "nuclear firestorm". In America, many civilians believe the air raid warnings to be signalling another drill and don't relocate in time. The Vaults close with few of their selected candidates inside, and those left outside perish in the resulting chaos or are horrifically mutated by radiation. Ill-equipped to handle the reality of a nuclear apocalypse, most Vaults collapse in the ensuing decades. Human civilization disappears from existence.

In 2161, the Vault Dweller (whose travels are documented in their well-loved biography, Fallout) leaves Vault 13 to find a replacement for its broken water chip. On their journey, they discover a hellish version of human society that still exists in the wreckage of its former glory. Their child would later beget the Chosen One (of Fallout 2 fame), who in 2241 travels the wasteland in search of a Garden of Eden Creation Kit, and gives the remaining members of the Enclave their just reward.

In 2277, the Lone Wanderer (from Fallout 3) escapes Vault 101 in search of their father and gives humanity the one thing it needs most to rebuild. And possibly that same year, the Sole Survivor emerges from Vault 111 and takes on the task of restoring what was once Boston, Massachusetts. Two hundred years after it was nearly obliterated, against all logic and expectations, humanity stubbornly continues to live.

The old stock's a little flat these days, though. And irradiated.

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.

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.