A 21-hour space battle that destroyed roughly $330,000 of real-world value. A corporate empire dismantled from the inside by a single director with the right permissions. A bank CEO who embezzled 200 billion ISK and used the proceeds for a house down payment. This episode explores EVE Online, launched in 2003 by Iceland’s CCP Games, and how a space simulator set 21,000 years in the future in the stranded galaxy of New Eden became a player-driven society with its own economy, politics, and history.

We explain the five factions, the single shared server of over 7,800 star systems, real-time skill training that continues while you are logged out, and the PLEX system that gives every ship a calculable dollar value, including Titans estimated at around $7,600 each. Then we cover suicide ganking under Concord’s punitive-not-preventive policing, lawless null-sec alliances, the 2014 battle of B-R5RB that started with a missed sovereignty payment, the 2009 Goonswarm infiltration that disbanded Band of Brothers, the EBank embezzlement, the 2007 T20 developer scandal, and the Council of Stellar Management, an elected player body flown to Reykjavik to negotiate with developers.

• How a 17-kilometer Titan requires a human supply chain of miners, refiners, and manufacturers working for weeks
• Why CCP hired an academic economist in 2007 to publish quarterly reports on the in-game economy
• How time dilation kept the servers alive during B-R5RB as thousands of players logged in
• Why scamming, extortion, and theft are permitted mechanics and the developers will not refund victims
• Why the Museum of Modern Art added EVE Online player history to its permanent collection