This article was originally published on July 17, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

Can science non-fiction sell? Cognition Europe believes so. Centred on the question of the preservation of human artefacts, Lunar Strike, the Belgian studio's debut title, casts the player as a junior archivist inside humanity's last lunar colony in 2119. When sabotage pushes the settlement towards collapse, decisions need to be made about what gets saved or lost for good. 

Knowledge spoke to creative director Brian Pope and development director Jan Goossens about the premise, the commercial opportunity for educative fiction of this type, and the trade-offs of building a game tightly bound to reality. 

The problem: what survives destruction 

For Pope, the starting point predates the game by more than a decade. 

"I was sitting in a Paris café, reading about how ISIS was destroying an ancient Roman ruin called Palmyra, in Syria," he says. "I had a sense of helplessness and outrage that washed over me. It reminded me of how I'd felt years earlier, when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan." 

As a former visual-effects artist, Pope recognised the tools already existed to respond, and founded The Arc/k Project, a non-profit that trains volunteers in lidar and photogrammetry to scan heritage under threat. 

"We pioneered the idea that concerned citizens could do 3D archiving themselves, and decide what heritage mattered to them," he says. The organisation built what Pope calls "the best digital archive of Palmyra out there," drawn from crowdsourced tourist photographs and archaeological survey data – "something we feel belongs to the Syrian people themselves." 

The same tension runs through Lunar Strike's fiction. The colony's antagonists, a radicalised Earth-first faction, believe humanity has no business in space while the home planet's problems remain unsolved. Pope was insistent they not be written as cartoonish. 

"This is a tension that actually exists right now," he says. "I wanted a villain with a reasonable set of beliefs, even if I disagree with the conclusion he draws from them."

From citizen science to playable archive 

Pope describes space as the logical next frontier for The Arc/k Project's mission. 

"We've already generated a tremendous number of artefacts and stories that will inform history for the next thousand years, and we're not very good at archiving any of it," he says. 

That translates directly into game mechanics: players scan objects and people using techniques modelled on lidar, photogrammetry and Gaussian splatting, the method of reconstructing 3D scenes and items from a set of 2D photographs. 

"If you photograph something from enough directions in a second or two, you can generate enough data to build a 3D model, one that could even be 3D printed," Pope explains. "That matters in the game, and in real life, because heritage is fragile. It can be stolen, vandalised, destroyed, lost." 

The central dilemma – what to keep, what to jettison – draws, fittingly, on reality. 

"Neil Armstrong's boots were left on the Moon out of necessity," Pope says. "The mission had collected so many geological samples that the crew couldn't take the extra weight. As archivists, we archive everything, even what got left behind. One man's garbage is another man's heritage." 

The constraints: real physics, real audience 

Building within realistic lunar physics presented certain problems. 

"If you jumped a metre on Earth, you'd fly six metres on the Moon," Goossens notes. "If players can't change direction mid-flight, that gets frustrating fast. We had to work out how much of that we could bend before it stopped feeling real." 

Where the team did bend reality, it chose to say so. For example, an orbital station in the game sits at an altitude from which, their astrophysics consultant confirmed, it would actually fall. 

"We kept it anyway, for the game's sake," Goossens says. "But in the archive, you can read the science that says it shouldn't be there. We don't think our audience are just people shooting things behind a screen. We think they're serious enough to want to know where we took a shortcut, and that they'll respect us more for admitting it." 

It's that seriousness that forms Pope vision of the game's intended audience. 

"The crossover audience is anyone who wants a sense of wonder – an adventure that's realistically grounded but still engages with the potential of humanity," he says.  

"We're tired of Frankenstein stories where technology is only ever the villain. We wanted to tell one about using technology to solve a problem, even when it caused that problem." 

Goossens is candid about the commercial risk of originality. 

"Everyone says the concept is completely unique," he says. "That's flattering, but it worries us too – does the audience not exist, or is it just unserved?" 

Cognition Europe is already thinking beyond the game itself: Last Rocket Out Pictures, a sister venture in early development, is working to extend the same world into film and television.

This article was originally published on July 17, 2026 - read the full issue