Before Starfield, there was Delta V.

Bethesda Softworks’ latest video game (and its first original concept in a quarter of a century) is a massive open-world adventure boasting over 1,000 explorable planets in a future where humanity colonizes the Milky Way. But as Bethesda founder Christopher Weaver will tell you, Starfield isn’t the company’s first foray into space.

“We created Delta V many, many years ago [29 years ago, to be exact] and it was a massive space game,” Weaver tells Inverse. “We had a great time flying our little ships around the massive mothership, trying to have these furious firefights and stay out of the way of other people. To me, Starfield is basically Delta V on steroids.”

Most people would agree that David Fincher’s protagonists aren’t exactly cool dudes. There’s the hapless, wonky-smiled Nick in Gone Girl, mega-nerd Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, and selfish divorcé Nicholas in The Game, to name a few. The link? All these characters are under the deluded impression that they are cool, or smart, or have their lives together, only for the plot developments to prove them wrong.

It’s true, then, that the protagonist in The Killer — who presents as an A-grade assassin, but continually makes mistakes in favor of side-quests and futile revenge — doesn’t break that mold. But whereas those prior characters all felt meticulously and carefully coded (this is Fincher, after all) to have goals and principles that made sense in the context of the narrative, Michael Fassbender’s killer is a bag of contradictions who goes through no real moment of reckoning.