Today, No Man’s Sky players made a significant historical find for the game they adore. Hello Games appears to have been sharing and saving each iteration of No Man’s Sky as it was published, and you can now download and play them all.

Southerncard, a Twitter user, shared a Reddit post today in which u/laikaspark shared links to complete copies of No Man’s Sky. The URLs are archive files that, once obtained, can be used to launch a particular version of the game through GOG. We looked into it, and the variants go all the way back to vanilla No Man’s Sky, which everyone was enthusiastic about but few people liked playing. The cause for this is that it lacked the game’s current supplemental material. Your only objective was to locate a ship, gather and construct upgrades as you traveled from world to planet, and eventually approach the galaxy’s core.

These files survive only because Hello Games submitted them to GOG. We’re not sure why the developer felt the need to record every iteration of the game, but being able to see how the game worked as each update was published is excellent for preservation. Fans who want to recreate the early days of a specific update, such as Atlas Rising, can now do so simply and share their experience with peers.

Hello Games has uploaded all old versions of NMS to GOG… FOR FREE! From release to Atlas Rises!

This is a HUGE find for old heads like me who miss the old game. Shoutout to the redditor who found it! https://t.co/LruX8ndssA— #GoCards (@SouthernCard) March 1, 2023

There have been 23 upgrades since then, and the game is unrecognizable from the early iterations. There are bandits, space bases, NPCs with whom you can construct a community, living spacecraft, and freighters. You can construct a stronghold, perform on the Nintendo Switch, and much more. If you want to see what the game was like at debut or when the Pathfinder or Foundation updates were first published, you can do so with the help of this file archive.