Mars 2030
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| Mars 2030 | |
|---|---|
| |
| Information | |
| VR/AR | VR |
| Developer | FMG Labs |
| Publisher | Fusion Media Group |
| Platform | SteamVR, Oculus Rift (Platform) |
| Device | HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, OSVR |
| Operating System | Windows |
| Type | Full Game |
| Genre | Simulation, VR, Mars, Exploration, Space |
| Input Device | Tracked Motion Controllers, Gamepad, Keyboard / Mouse |
| Play Area | Seated, Standing |
| Game Mode | Single Player |
| Language | English |
| Rating | Everyone |
| Review | Mostly Positive |
| Release Date | July 31, 2017 |
| Price | US$14.99 |
| App Store | Steam |
| Website | https://web.archive.org/web/20170822233231/http://mars2030-vr.com/home-1/ |
| Infobox Updated | 10/21/2026 |
Mars 2030 is a virtual reality simulation of a crewed mission to the surface of Mars, developed by FMG Labs, a division of Fusion Media Group, and produced in partnership with NASA. The player takes the role of an astronaut who explores about 40 square kilometers (15 square miles) of the Mawrth Vallis region, collects rock samples and studies them in a laboratory inside a surface habitat. The terrain was built from imagery taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and NASA supplied details of the spacesuit prototype, rover and habitat concepts that appear in the game.
The project was announced with NASA in December 2015 and shown at conferences and festivals during 2016. It was released on Steam on 31 July 2017 for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift at US$14.99, with a non-VR mode for ordinary PC screens. A PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR version was announced in June 2017, but the store description still lists it as coming at a later date.
Gameplay
Mars 2030 is a single-player, open-world exploration experience. Its developers described it as closer to an education and outreach project than a traditional game, and project lead Julian Reyes summed up the concept as exploring and making discoveries that "either unlock a piece of Mars history or take you back in time and let you see what this planet might have been like".
The game opens with the final descent to the surface. After landing with two other astronauts, the player can walk on foot, where jumps are tuned to Martian gravity, or drive the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV), a pressurized rover modeled on a real NASA design. The developer modeled the rover's joystick on the real vehicle's six-axis control scheme at Johnson Space Center, so turning is done with yaw and sideways driving by tilting the controller; an autopilot can drive the rover to a destination. The player plants flags at notable locations. In the pre-launch build a flag unlocked fast travel to that site, while in the release build every site can be reached by fast travel from the start, and a teleport function is always available.
Exploration is organized around Discovery Zones, which open up as the player collects rock samples. Two shown to the press at launch were a long lava tube and a tall, jagged mountain; picking up certain rocks plays a short vision of the planet's past, such as the lava flow that carved out the tube. Samples can be taken back to the habitat's Geolab and examined under a virtual microscope to search for signs of life. The habitat includes a waste processing area, a Veggie plant growth unit with rows of greenery and a research lab, and it is modeled after the habitat design from the Evolvable Mars Campaign at NASA's Langley Research Center. Floating information points describe the equipment and how it might be used on a real mission.
The suit and rover carry touch screens with biometric data, life support gauges and control switches, and an "Augmented Information System", an augmented reality overlay operated with the hand controllers, shows the astronaut's position and lets the player set waypoints. The simulation runs a full Martian day-night cycle in which the orange hues of day give way to blue sunsets and sunrises, and its dynamic weather includes dust storms and passing dust devils.
The game supports tracked motion controllers, a gamepad, and keyboard and mouse. A comfort mode makes teleports instantaneous and adds 45 degree snap turns, and the camera can be recentered so that the landing and rover sequences can be played seated and the on-foot sections standing.
Development
Origins
The project grew out of a 2014 paper co-written by MIT graduate students Sydney Do and Andrew Owens that questioned the feasibility of the Mars One colonization plan. Reyes, then Fusion's VR producer and designer, said the paper made the team ask what NASA was actually proposing for a human mission. Fusion contacted Do, who became the project's technical advisor and supplied studies, NASA contacts and design reviews; Reyes said the MIT group provided technical papers on habitation, spacesuits, rovers, food growth and in-situ resource utilization. Fusion, at the time a multi-platform media company owned by Univision and the Disney-ABC Television Group, then took the concept to NASA.
NASA and Fusion announced the partnership in December 2015 under the name "The Mars 2030 Experience". It was formalized through a Space Act Agreement, under which the agency shared the results of its studies on space transportation systems, concepts of operations, and human health and performance. NASA said the partnership made possible the first virtual reality Mars surface experience based on operational and hardware concepts that NASA and MIT were studying. The announcement described players exploring the surface in NASA's Z-2 spacesuit prototype and the interior of a prototype habitat proposed by NASA scientists. The team visited Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it tried a prototype rover and saw an astronaut VR training lab. Fusion also had access to NASA research labs, including the Hybrid Reality Lab, and Reyes later said Fusion had given its data to NASA so the agency could convert it into a training simulation for astronauts.
Team and technology
The game was built in Unreal Engine 4. Several members of the team had worked at Irrational Games, the studio behind BioShock Infinite, including technical designer Justin Sonnekalb. The 2016 project credits listed Reyes as original concept and project lead, Sydney Do as scientific consultant, Steve Ellmore as technical lead, Forrest Dowling as gameplay lead, Gwen Frey as lead animator, Alejandro Reyes as screenwriter and Tim Gedemer as sound design lead. Sonnekalb said that at the end of the first day of development the team had players walking and driving across terrain based on real altimetry data from the University of Arizona's HiRISE project.
In the 2016 build, the area open to the player covered about 20 square kilometers, built from topographic data sampled every meter and accurate to within 30 centimeters of actual elevation. The surrounding landscape visible in the distance stretched more than 700 kilometers and used data from the Mars Express orbiter. The team's lead environment artist worked with a NASA geologist to set the reflectance values of surface materials, and the game uses Unreal Engine's physically based rendering. Zvi Greenstein of NVIDIA, which worked closely with Fusion on the project, said the rover, habitat modules and labs were based on CAD models provided by NASA. The finished game covers about 40 square kilometers of Mawrth Vallis, a clay-rich region that was then one of two finalist landing sites for the ExoMars rover.
The team recorded the sound of a rover driving over the Mars Yard at Johnson Space Center with eight microphones. The game's ambisonic audio is filtered to match Mars' atmospheric pressure and the way sound travels there, so footsteps on rock sound muted. Composer Julio Reyes wrote an original score, titled "Hope" in 2016, which the London Symphony Orchestra performed. Julian Reyes said in 2016 that the music changed depending on where the player looked: toward crewmates it played music about camaraderie, and toward the landscape it conveyed fear and excitement.
Showings and changing plans
NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang showed the experience during his GPU Technology Conference keynote in April 2016, when Steve Wozniak, joining over a video feed, put on an HTC Vive and drove the rover; Wozniak said more than once that he felt dizzy. The team was then designing for a pair of GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics cards, and Greenstein said it planned to scale the experience down for more common hardware such as the GTX 970. The 2016 build used twin-stick movement without snap turning or blink options, which Reyes said would break immersion.
In 2016 the project's website listed the following planned showings.
| Date (2016) | Event |
|---|---|
| 16 March | SXSW Interactive (Austin, Texas) |
| 4-7 April | GPU Technology Conference (Silicon Valley, California) |
| 16 April | Tribeca Film Festival (New York) |
| 27 April | Silicon Valley VR (Silicon Valley, California) |
| 29 April | NASA Tech Day at the Capitol (Washington, D.C.) |
| 6-7 May | MIT VR and Documentary Conference (Cambridge, Massachusetts) |
| 15-16 May | VRX Europe Conference (London) |
| 16 May | Humans to Mars Summit |
| 16 June | Los Angeles Ideas Festival |
| 16-17 July | Sheffield Doc/Fest (Sheffield, United Kingdom) |
| 8-18 September | Toronto International Film Festival (Toronto) |
| October | III Points (Miami, Florida) |
At III Points, participants wore a spacesuit and helmet for the demonstration. An early build shown in mid-2016 offered little beyond looking around and driving a rover, and its robots did not react to the player.
The early plans differed from the finished product. In 2015 and early 2016, the experience was described as a free release for the Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR, with iPhone and Android apps, a Fusion television special and a Twitch broadcast, and the first public launch was planned for summer 2016. A multiplayer component was also being pursued. By April 2016 a Steam launch was expected that fall, initially with gamepad control on the Vive and Rift; Reyes said multiplayer was undecided and that later mission episodes were being considered. The game that shipped in 2017 was a paid PC title and FMG Labs' first release. Students and educators could get it free as part of the Space Act Agreement, and a free version was also offered to museum staff.
Release
On 8 June 2017, Fusion Media Group announced a July release for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR at US$15, with a non-VR version for PC. A launch date of 12 July was pushed back to late July, and the game was released on Steam on 31 July 2017. The PlayStation version was still described as coming soon at launch, and as of October 2026 the store description still says it will be available "at a later date (TBD)".
| Platform | Release date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Windows PC (Steam) | 31 July 2017 | HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and non-VR mode; US$14.99; free for students, educators and museum staff |
| PlayStation 4 / PlayStation VR | Announced 8 June 2017 | Store text still lists it as coming "at a later date (TBD)" |
Updates
FMG Labs released a series of patches in the two months after launch, mainly to fix performance problems, and said at launch that additional missions could follow. Several of the update announcements were signed by Reyes, by then Fusion Media Group's director of VR and AR. The last one posted on Steam is dated 28 September 2017.
| Date | Update |
|---|---|
| 1 August 2017 | Enabled NVIDIA single pass stereo on GeForce 10 series cards to improve VR frame rate |
| 3 August 2017 | Added instructions for driving the rover and recentering the camera in VR, and Alt-Enter full screen |
| 8 August 2017 | Fixed an Unreal Engine bug where changing graphics settings in game caused low frame rates; optimized the foliage system and MMSEV rover textures |
| 14 August 2017 | Fixed a crash on AMD graphics cards after landing; added a rover driving tutorial for HTC Vive and Oculus Touch controllers |
| 18 August 2017 | Version 1.1, a performance update with a reworked Mars landscape |
| 15 September 2017 | Added a simpler rover control mode using the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift controller pads; minor visual changes for performance |
| 28 September 2017 | Fixed teleport transitions during fast travel and bugs that dropped players off the world or back to the habitat teleport |
HP Mars Home Planet
In August 2017, HP Inc. and partners including NVIDIA, Autodesk, Fusion, Launch Forth, Technicolor, Unreal Engine and Vive launched HP Mars Home Planet, a year-long design project to simulate life on Mars for a population of one million people. Its planned virtual environment was to build on the Mawrth Vallis terrain from Mars 2030.
Reception
Launch coverage praised the scale and detail of the terrain, the modeling of the habitat and vehicles, the lighting, the ambisonic sound and the orchestral score, and singled out the day-night cycle and blue Martian sunsets. Critics also found that there was not much to do once the samples were collected, and pointed to unfinished menus, physics glitches, an awkward body avatar and tilt controls for the rover that were too sensitive. Smooth locomotion and the rover's unusual movement made some players dizzy. The release build fixed many problems found in pre-launch code, adding working snap turns and camera recentering, but the game was still described as rough around the edges, and fast travel made the rover almost redundant.
As of October 2026, the Steam user rating is "Mostly Positive", with 61 positive and 26 negative reviews out of 87.
Features
System requirements
Windows
Minimum
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel i3-6100 / AMD FX4350 or greater
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX480
- VR Support: SteamVR or Oculus PC
Recommended
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080 or AMD Radeon RX480