Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson has revealed the first details of his next game, as space title called 0x10c. It is being described as extremely early in development, but Notch expects to let players in to help shape the experience early on. It seems Notch is looking at some kind of subscription model for the multiplayer as the game will simulate computers and physics when players are logged off.
This is the setting summed up in a brief excerpt:
"In a parallel universe where the space race never ended, space travel was gaining popularity amongst corporations and rich individuals.
In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years.
It's now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy."
Serious competition for Eve Online it would seem...