Did Carl Sagan really work on a video game?
The telegenic astronomer who captivated the masses brought at least one of his "billions and billions" of ideas to gaming. Here it is.
Carl Sagan died at just 62 years old in 1996—far too young for one of America’s preeminent planetary minds, but late enough to see video games begin to seep into the mainstream in a way they never had before. That year Nintendo 64 hit the market, Quake shook keyboards, and a zany marsupial named Crash Bandicoot leapt into our collective consciousness.
But in 1983, when Sagan was still riding high from his star turn in the thirteen-part, Emmy and Peabody award-winning PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, he had an idea for a video game that, in his own words, could “teach a great deal of astronomy in a context as exciting as most violent video games.”
(Which violent games he had in mind is unclear; Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong ruled the nascent home video game market that year, and Pole Position led the way at the arcade. But we digress.)
The astronomic game would be based on what would become Sagan’s novel Contact, about a researcher who receives a message from an extraterrestrial civilization. (At the time, Sagan was in the midst of writing the book; it became an international bestseller almost immediately after its 1985 debut.) The goal of the game, Sagan wrote, would be to find the nearest galactic civilization to Earth. Or, if the player started elsewhere in the galaxy, he added, to find the youngest galactic civilization “in order to help it before it destroys itself—which most of them generally do.”
Sagan was vague on the mechanics of his proposed game—after all, it was only an idea—but made it clear that the Milky Way galaxy, even only partially rendered by technology of the time, could serve as a “natural arena for a game in which something is lost and must be found.” Thank you planetary scientist, but your princess is in another star system.
Did Sagan ever pursue the idea? We don’t know, though if he did, nothing commercial came of it. Contact did go on to become a 1997 film starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, but the 2006 game Contact, though set in outer space, is unrelated to Sagan’s book.
What we are pretty sure of? That Sagan would have been blown away by the capacity for today’s technology to render the universe in incredible detail. Starstuff processed to depict starstuff. And more proof, we’d argue, that humans are capable of working magic.