Fresh out of college in 1995, Bouma joined Bethesda Softworks and the game’s team when the project was already well underway. To understand how Daggerfall’s world-one where I spent countless hours-came together, I called up Hal Bouma, a coder who helped create the game’s map. Nevertheless, the sentiments they aspire to produce-and the ways they produce them-are strikingly similar. In Daggerfall, each player will see slightly different things at most locations in No Man’s Sky, players can theoretically visit the same worlds and witness the same sights, but there are so many locations, it’s unlikely to happen often. For one, Daggerfall is more random than its distant descendant. There are, to be sure, differences aplenty between them. Though a few gamers have noted the spiritual bond between the two games, discussion of those links has been largely absent from most prominent discussions of the newer title.

And many, many more games have embraced such methods since then.ĭespite that rich history, Daggerfall still makes for the most apt point of reference largely because, as with No Man’s Sky, the results of its procedural world-building are dull for the very reasons that they’re sometimes astonishing. Earlier games, including the influential 1980 dungeon crawler Rogue, had also employed randomized design mechanics to similar effect. In a 2015 New Yorker article that helped bring mainstream attention to No Man’s Sky, Raffi Khatchadourian points to an especially prominent antecedent, the 1984 space adventure title Elite. Daggerfall was not the first game to rely on procedural generation.

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