GamingProject Awakening is born from EVE Online’s fragility - so it's turning to the blockchain

“Not everyone is Nintendo,” Hilmar Veigar Pétursson says. “Corporate entities, historically, are not very long-living. By being 30 years old, CCP is old by company standards.” As we talk, his fixation on persistence and artefact becomes clear. Though, he’s never hidden it. In 2014, Pétursson’s company, CCP, unveiled a five-metre-tall sculpture with the names of every active player in their MMO, EVE Online, etched into its surface; this year, they expanded the monument to add the names of players who have subscribed in the decade since. “I've been obsessed about doing things like printed books, magazines, models of EVE Online...,” Pétursson tells me, “like there's this need to leave a footprint.”

Pétursson has discovered a company that uses cow stem cells to 3D print calfskin. For the studio’s 30th anniversary, he plans to commission a poetry chapter inspired by Iceland’s epic history book, the Prose Edda, write it on the artificial skin, and put it in a Reykjavik museum. It would sit alongside an ancient calfskin copy of the Icelandic sagas. “It was written 1000 years ago, but as an Icelandic person, I can still read and understand what it says,” Pétursson explains. He tells me that it’s an effective way of storing data because if you sent a USB stick 1,000 years into the future, where would you even find a computer with a drive to read it? This appreciation for artefacts and need for legacy has led to his current project, a new game from CCP using blockchain technology, currently known as Project Awakening.

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