NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States, has tried many different ways to encourage public interest in science education and space exploration. That included a brief pivot to video game publishing, of all things.
In 2009, NASA teamed up with multiple video game studios to create a space-themed MMO. The result was a moon base simulator game that became a meme: Moonbase Alpha.
To the Moon
Virtual Heroes was founded in 2004 as a game studio focused on training simulators and other non-entertainment "serious games." Its first major client was the United States Army, which tasked the company with working on updates for "America's Army," the 2002 first-person shooter. That game was the first major use of video games as a recruitment tool for the United States military, which somehow remained online until 2022.
Virtual Heroes was acquired by Applied Research Associates in 2009, a research and development firm working on everything from building evacuation simulators to advanced directed energy weapons. The company's presence in the military-industrial complex, combined with a 2006 concept for a multiplayer virtual astronaut game, helped gain the attention of a certain federal space agency.
In 2009, NASA announced plans for a massively multiplayer online game, called "Astronaut: Moon, Mars, and Beyond." The game was pitched as a learning tool that would recreate spacecraft, technology, and robotics based on NASA prototypes, built on top of Unreal Engine 3. Three studios were tasked with development: Virtual Heroes, Canada-based Project Whitecard, and Information in Place (now WisdomTools).
Daniel Laughlin, project manager at NASA Learning Technologies, told Yahoo Games, "We want to create a fun, compelling gaming experience that will give players the chance to learn about science and engineering careers while they play the game." It was set for a 2010 release, with a demo to arrive before the end of 2009. That demo eventually became Moonbase Alpha.
Moonbase Alpha
Moonbase Alpha was finally released in July 2010 as "a realistic multiplayer game that will allow players to experience a hypothetical day in the life of a lunar astronaut." It was developed entirely by Army Game Studio, the primary creator of America's Army, and Virtual Heroes. NASA said it was "meant as a precursor" to the in-development MMO.
The game is set in a fictional lunar outpost in the year 2032, where players are tasked with repairing critical systems after a meteor strike. You have 25 minutes to repair the life support systems with various tools and robots at your disposal. It was partially based on designs for the Constellation program, NASA's crewed spaceflight plans for future Moon and Mars missions. Constellation was fully cancelled later that year with the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, but some parts of Constellation eventually became the Space Launch System that completed its first launch in 2022.
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