GRR

We could soon colonise the moon and video games can help

31st January 2025
Ben Miles

If you were at the Goodwood Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard in 2023 and made the sensible decision to take a look inside Future Lab presented by Randox, you may have noticed a stand that appeared to be playing Fortnite.

And, to an extent, you would have been correct. Epic Games, the mega-successful games company behind it, took a space in Future Lab to show off its Lunar Horizons project. A Fortnite development that puts players right in the centre of space exploration.

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But Epic Games was there to prove that Fortnite is far more than that. Yes, Lunar Horizons sits inside the sprawling world of the monstrously successful Fortnite machine. But the concept beneath it has its roots strongly planted in the real world. And not just our world.

In fact, Lunar Horizons is a collaboration between Epic Games and several other groups, including the European Space Agency (ESA). It mixes real data taken from the moon with genuine lunar habitat designs to create an experience for players that mimics, as closely as we can imagine, what establishing a colony on the moon would be like.

And that concept isn’t as pie-in-the-sky as we might think. ESA, NASA (the North American Space Agency) and various others are currently working toward establishing exactly that: a long-term moon home for astronauts. And all the various components to this project were shown in some form at Goodwood. 

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But, what does actual humans going to the moon have to do with Fortnite? That’s a question James Golding, Epic Games’ Technical Director, is able to answer.

“Lunar Horizons is essentially an island that anyone can play, anyone with Fortnite. It’s free to get the game, where they can play with their friends,” Golding told GRR. “The idea [in Lunar Horizons] is to build a moon base, finish a moon base, rooted in some of the real science, some of the real engineering and technology that we expect to see present on the moon in the coming years and decades. 

“So they have to gather resources on the moon together and finish off this moon habitat. But there is some threat as well, there are solar storms that can threaten the player and so they have to take shelter in the same way a radiation shelter would be a consideration for anyone that’s going to be spending a lot of time on the moon.  So that’s something we thought we could incorporate in a fun way as well.”

Epic Games doesn’t just make games like Fortnite, or if you’re a little bit older, Unreal Tournament. It’s the company behind the rendering behemoth that is the Unreal Engine. Epic Games described Unreal Engine as “the most powerful 3D rendering tool” and if you see any of the many thousands of pieces that have been made using Unreal, it’s hard to argue. 

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For Epic Games the obvious purpose of getting involved in projects like Lunar Horizons is to prove the abilities of its tools. To learn what can be made with Unreal and, of course, to market to other brands who may want to use it. But, for both Epic and ESA, there are more reasons to work together than just pure profit.

“It demonstrates to partners like ESA and other organisations that this is something that might be relevant, that, ‘oh this is a platform we can use to reach an audience or to bring what we’re doing to a wider audience’,” James adds.

“And also to players. I think it’s important that we slowly change the perception of what Fortnite is, from just this sort of core battle royale game, to something which has a real breadth of content for a wide audience. And so I think that it’s helpful for us to do these projects that are slightly outside of Fortnite because it helps to change that perception.

“From ESA’s side I think it was a couple of things. A big part of what ESA does is about education, it’s about outreach, it’s about inspiring people. So it’s partly about these huge technical challenges of what they are trying to do. I think they saw it as an interesting opportunity to make people aware of what they are doing, what the goals are. I think a lot of people weren’t aware of a lot of things like, why would we go to the south pole of the moon? There’s water there?”

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Working together Epic and ESA didn’t just build a fantasy world of moon bases and space missions. Using knowledge from people who have actively worked on sending objects and people to the moon transformed what could have been a simple space simulator into something far more real.

“The main asset we got was the Argonaut lander, which was shown at Goodwood,” James continued. “This amazing full-size model that was at Future Lab, which was great. So we can take the 3D model and bring that into the game. So that was a real direct process.

“There were other things where they could point us toward, there’s been a lot of data gathered by different space agencies, like topographic data for the moon, so we used that for the starting point for our level, so we could bring that actual surface data in. We did a bit of massaging, like changing the scale, but it was good to start with something that was legitimate.

“Also the fact was that we could play it with them and they could give us feedback on ‘oh you shouldn’t use red bands because that would indicate warning’. Other things like moon dust, a number of people at ESA brought up how pervasive the moon dust is. It gets everywhere, it sticks to everything.

“And so they said ‘the space suits are far too clean’ anyone on the moon’s surface is going to be caked in this stuff. So we went back and painted a whole bunch more moon dust onto things, so it was really interesting to get the feedback like that that we wouldn’t have thought of.”

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Far from just creating a landscape of fun things to do, with Lunar Horizons Epic Games and ESA hope to not only inspire, but showcase the progress that space technology is really making. Long after the last Space Shuttle was grounded the world of extraterrestrial exploration hasn’t stood still. Humans might not have stood on the moon since the 1970s, but plans to change that are not only in motion, but making progress.

But, is that the end of Epic Games’ ideas with Unreal? Far from it. Reflecting on his time at Goodwood James says the interest was significant, both from players of Fortnite and those who hadn’t ever picked up a controller.

That also leads into more projects that Epic is working on, from expanding the uses of Unreal as a tool for training (even potentially in space) to assisting the creation of our next generation of buildings - Epic has worked with Zaha Hadid architects. The hope is that these new partnerships showcase that gaming technology has uses and reach far beyond your living room. And on the evidence of Lunar Horizons at Goodwood, they’re right. 

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