10 Times Video Games Accurately Predicted The Future
Hideo Kojima is a prophet. Probably.
Now and then when sitting down to enjoy a piece of entertainment, you might catch a phrase in either the opening or closing credits that is designed to absolve the writers of any strange happenstances. We've no doubt all seen it, something along the lines of "any similarity to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental".
Sometimes though, you have to wonder if somebody knew something they shouldn't...
Now and then a piece of media might come along with a plot-line that feels somewhere outside of the realm of plausible but upon later reflection seems like a warning of what's to come. Through pattern recognition, writers are able to construct stories that predict events in the real world with worrying accuracy. Others get there just by pure dumb luck and sheer force of will.
And then, very occasionally, you get a man like Hideo Kojima, who recently made clear his intention to "live on as an AI" after death and, considering his track history on predicting future events, we shouldn't laugh at such a notion.
This list will take a look at a few video games that feel very strange to look back on considering how accurately they predicted the future.
10. Elite Dangerous Finds A Real Star System Before NASA
For all of human history and knowledge, and despite passionate people who spend their lives studying it, understanding and unravelling the truths of outer space is still a slow process.
In February 2017, astronomers discovered a new system of planets orbiting a star called Trappist-1. Even finding one new star is something to be excited about, but for NASA to discover a system of seven planets that seemed similar to our own was a real moment in astronomy.
Except someone had beaten them to it… sort of.
Elite Dangerous is a space-faring adventure title that, by its very nature, needs to have a vast universe for its players to explore. As such, Frontier Developers used an algorithm of pre-existing space data to plot out their solar system. Upon the discovery of Trappist-1, the devs looked into their game’s map and found that their algorithm had pretty much already put it there.
39 light years away from Earth, which in a relative sense is pretty close to Trappist-1’s 39.5 light years, there was a brown dwarf star and several planets around it.
NASA: Boldly going where video game algorithms have gone before.