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Hello Games
February 22, 2026 at 06:07 AM
Initial article covering studio history, games, team, and key events
Sean Murray, Grant Duncan, Ryan Doyle, and David Ream founded Hello Games in February 2008. The company was formally incorporated on 4 August 2008. Murray had been working at Criterion Games on the Burnout series, then moved to Kuju Entertainment as technical director, before deciding he was done making sequels for other publishers. The studio set up in Guildford, Surrey, which has been a hub for British game development since the early 2000s.
The founding team was four people in a small office. They self-funded their first project and kept overhead as low as possible. That scrappy, small-team philosophy has stuck with the company even as it grew.
Joe Danger (2010) was the debut: a 2.5D arcade stunt game about a washed-up motorcycle daredevil. It won Best New Studio and Best Micro Studio at the 2010 Develop Awards. A sequel, Joe Danger 2: The Movie, followed in 2012.
Then came No Man's Sky in 2016. The ambition was staggering: 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets in an infinite universe. The launch was rocky (more on that below), but the game became one of the most celebrated comeback stories in the industry through years of free updates.
The Last Campfire (2020) was a small puzzle-adventure game, a side project made by a sub-team within the studio. Then in December 2023, Murray announced Light No Fire at The Game Awards: a fantasy survival sandbox set on a single Earth-sized planet.
In late 2024, Hello Games also announced they would publish Stage Fright, a cooperative game from Ghost Town Games (the Overcooked developers). It marked the studio's first foray into publishing other developers' work.
On Christmas Eve 2013, a river near the Guildford office broke its banks. The ground floor flooded, destroying hardware and equipment. The team salvaged most of their code from waterlogged machines and relocated. Development on No Man's Sky continued with minimal delay, though Murray later said the experience was demoralizing for such a small team.
No Man's Sky launched in August 2016 to enormous hype and immediate backlash. Players felt the game was missing features that had been discussed in pre-release interviews and trailers. The reaction was severe. Murray received death threats; the studio stayed in constant contact with Scotland Yard during that period.
Rather than walking away, Hello Games went silent and started building. The Foundation update in November 2016 added base building. NEXT in 2018 added full multiplayer. Beyond in 2019 added VR. They kept shipping free updates for years. By 2020, the consensus had shifted: No Man's Sky was the rare game that actually delivered on its original promises, just on a longer timeline than anyone expected.
As of late 2025, Hello Games has roughly 70 employees across offices in Guildford and Cambridge. The studio remains independent with no outside publisher. Murray has repeatedly emphasized the small-team approach, calling the Light No Fire development squad "tiny" as recently as November 2025.
Key people include Sean Murray (managing director and co-founder), Grant Duncan (art director and co-founder), and Jenna Copley (finance director). The studio does not crunch in the traditional sense, though Murray has acknowledged the workload is heavy for a team this size attempting projects this large.
