“When you don’t have this technology, you can’t really start the game,” Ancel explains. “It’s too difficult. But now we can say for sure that we will make this game, we’ll finish it. Because we have the technology for it.” He describes the game’s current status as “day zero of development.”
Three years ago they started working on the technology that would power the experience — it started out as a kind of solar system simulation tool — and only recently have they started actually building the game.