
There are many examples like this in human history, where some tracer bullet takes off, but it's so ahead of its time that it takes many years to be adopted by others. Then someone had the idea of making them run on petrol and kind of killed the electric car. "Before there were petrol cars, there were electric cars," CCP's CEO Hilmar Pétursson told me back in April. Two decades later, that game – EVE Online – is still ahead of its time. But before Azeroth opened its gates, a spreadsheet-laden spaceship game from a small studio in Iceland went all-in on the idea of a player-driven sandbox and never looked back.
