How Eve Online, A Blood Expert, And A Trip To The Moon Came Together For The Strangest Of Promotions

At Fanfest 2025, Fenris Creations' CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson made a throwaway comment about preserving the history of Eve Online in an epic poem--inked in the blood of the players who created it. Turns out, the members of Eve's absurdly dedicated playerbase were surprisingly enthusiastic about the idea. Now, at the 2026 edition of Fanfest, Fenris Creations (formerly CCP Games) is collecting their blood and putting it to use to realize a pretty extreme goal. But it's one that doesn't look anything like how the studio originally envisioned it. After last year's Fanfest, developers set to work on figuring out just how to safely collect players' blood and use it as ink to write the poem, known in Eve as the Capsuleer Edda. They quickly realized several things: Blood is a terrible ink; collecting the necessary amount of blood from each person is ethically questionable; and responsibly gathering one of the most precious bodily fluids a person possesses is trickier than it first seems. So, they set out to find some help. Developers started searching for blood experts who might have the expertise they needed, and discovered an unassuming news article. The article mentioned Mark Crowther, an acclaimed University professor and chair of medicine at McMaster University, and the Leo Pharma chair in Thrombosis Research. He's also a global authority on blood disorders and anticoagulation. It talked about Crowther's work on a study focused on the blood thinner Warfarin, taking place in Iceland, where Fenris Creations is based. And it mentioned that Crowther, or Crowthrm Kaundur, as he's known in-game, was an avid fan of Eve Online. The stars had seemingly aligned, and Fenris had their expert. The Capsuleer Edda was a-go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uegcZqbpKfY I spoke to Crowther at this year's Fanfest about his involvement with the project, and how it's changed since Fenris's early visualizations. I was in the audience last year when Hilmar [Veigar Pétursson, Fenris CEO] announced it, Crowther explained. When he said he was going to write the history of Eve in blood, I looked at my son and said, 'That's cool, but it's also really dumb.' That's for two big reasons. The first is, you can't just use human blood for something because it isn't ink--it wouldn't work as an ink--but more importantly, you'd create a huge biohazard. You can't just start sloshing human blood around! Crowther received an email from Pétursson a few months later, which opened a dialogue between him and the developers working on the Capsuleer Edda project. Hilmar Smári Finsen, Fenris's marketing and events coordinator, confirmed that Fenris was having some difficulties in making the project a reality. They wanted to be able to look a Capsuleer in the eye and say, 'If you do the appropriate test, you will be in that ink,' Crowther explained. But the way they originally wanted to do it, it just wouldn't work. The Capsuleer Edda. Because Iceland has traditionally had a very genetically homogenous population, there's been a lot of DNA work done here, he continued. A lot. Some really important studies have come out of Iceland and so as a result of that, there's a lot of technology companies in Iceland. One such company is helping Fenris ensure that the procedure is safe, and is processing the participants' collected blood. That processing removes any pathogens and minimizes the biohazard risk. We put in place industry-standard rigor around making sure the blood is not a biohazard, Crowther explained. Eve is dying. Another issue the team faced was more ethical. DNA is very personal, there are all kinds of consent and legal issues around how you use it, and we've worked through that with the help of an Icelandic legal team, he said. Finsen stated that there is no person I would rather have on the team than [Mark]. Every conversation we've had, we've expressed some concerns or issues. He's just like, 'This is the way to do it, this is how you do it.' He's solved a lot of issues that we, as a video game company, never could have imagined. For Crowther, that's just second nature. In the real world where I work, in terms of research and stuff, we deal with this every day, he said. We do these kinds of projects. For these guys, it's like, 'Oh my God, how are we going to do this?' For us, it's like, 'Oh, we got to get another consent through.' So it was a neat alignment of two completely divergent sets of skills. Eve Online. With the technicalities of gathering and processing blood under control, Fenris's next consideration was around what, exactly, they wanted to preserve for thousands of years. The term edda has been applied to two medieval Icelandic texts: the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda. Both were recorded in 13th Century Iceland, but refer to material far older, reaching as far back as the time of the Vikings. Due to their influence on Iceland's skaldic tradition, Fenris knew that it wanted to follow a similar path and create something that would be referred back to, not only as a way to understand Eve Online, but a way to understand the world players experienced outside of the game. The Capsuleer Edda poem is being written collaboratively by Andri Snær Magnason and Jónas Reynir Gunnarsson, two local poets with extensive experience. Magnason has known Fenris CEO Pétursson for some time--the two were actually born on the same day in the same house. Magnason's brother even helped with beta testing Eve Online prior to its release. Gunnarsson played Eve Online from its inception and became a poet later in life. Death is a serious matter. Hilmar and I have often discussed all sorts of concepts of games, games versus real life, and a game as the mother of storytelling, Gunnarsson explained. It was impossible 30 years ago to immerse so many people within a single universe. Pétursson, Gunnarsson, and Magnason would go on to discuss putting the world of Eve into words with a root--a mythological source, a founding poem. It's not only the game's Bible, but something even deeper. We went further into it and I said, 'If we do that, I would want it to be written on calfskin.' Then I spoke to the calfskin provider in the UK, and he claims that it will last for 5,000 years, Magnason said. Calfskin is used in the project because of its longevity, but also because of its rich historical legacy. Calfskin was used in the Middle Ages for valuable texts. The calfskin provider, Gunnarsson explains, makes most of the documents for the royal family. The Capsuleer Edda will be the first Icelandic text to be preserved on calfskin, or vellum, in 700 years. Eve Online. Of course, 5,000 years in the future would see a very different world than the one we live in now. If the Edda is kept in a dry place away from sunlight, it has the potential to outlast almost everything that we can see now. Magnason and Gunnarsson knew it was important to not only capture the spirit of Eve, but to preserve the state of the universe as we know and live in it today. When we started making the poem, and started thinking of it lasting for 5,000 years, then we thought of it as one of a few artifacts that might remain from our current civilization. It could be the only text of us that will remain, from all of our books of poetry. So that turned into a conceptual artwork, Magnason explained. Kind of like how Icelandic mythology might be a future memory, that's what the Vikings were dreaming of--the afterlife, where they would fight all day and drink all night amongst the stars. That is what's happening here now. Gunnarsson added, It's like a video game. They kill each other, and you're revived, reborn, and just drink with your buddies. The Vikings dreamed of the excitement and urges and essence of war, without the bloody consequences of grief and terror. Could you work all of those urges out in a space where it's basically a game? That was Valhalla, Gunnarsson said. Now we are in Valhalla, but maybe there is a future memory of this actual world after 20,000 years that we haven't found out yet. Because Hilmar and Eve Online have been flirting with the Viking heritage, with swords, it's been a bit anachronistic. Eve Online. During the keynote speech at this year's Eve Fanfest, Pétursson mentioned that he wanted to take the Capsuleer Edda to the moon. As I've come to learn, when the Fenris Creations CEO jokes about something, it very quickly becomes a real possibility. It might be on the moon for a thousand years, and then somebody brings it back, and there has been a 700-year regime on Earth that has erased everything that we've done. All previous history has been erased, so we've had to consider how to convey 2026 to a civilization where this constructed, manmade, linear time has been erased and 2026 doesn't mean anything, Magnason explained. The process of taking the blood and the resulting mix up of all of the DNA came as a bit of a surprise to Magnason, who says that he'd prefer to have the possibility of reviving players thousands of years in the future purely from their DNA. I understand the ethical concerns, but you leave DNA everywhere, he said. You go to the hairdresser and leave it behind! Eve Fanfest 2026. Although the Capsuleer Edda is going to be written on calfskin, possibly in a shortened form since calfskin is very expensive, Andri said, he also believes that poetry should reach people. I think some games could be questionable, but this game has real deep threads of friendship, people have real, life-changing experiences, he said. Poetry always amplifies, supports, or mirrors those experiences. It's not solely his decision, but Magnason said he believes the Capsuleer Edda should be offered to Eve players in a format other than the original calfskin copies, so they can read it and experience it in their own way. Although the timeline for the creation of the Capsuleer Edda is not firmly established just yet, everyone involved assures me that it will definitely be happening. So, while the first version of the Edda has been printed, it's not yet available to read, and Fenris doesn't want to give players false expectations around that timeline. With the scientific processes underway, and the poets having kindly done a deep dive on how they went about writing the Capsuleer Edda, there was only one thing left for me to do. I had to get involved. Having my blood taken (!) Signing up to the blood donation was easy, albeit thorough. There were plenty of consent forms to read, and the medical staff on site did an excellent job of explaining the procedure. They'd first clean my skin with an alcohol wipe, and then take out a clean, sterilized, single-use needle.They pricked my index finger and squeezed it, allowing a few drops of blood to drop onto a piece of absorbent paper that soaked them up. That was then tossed into a general box, immediately anonymizing my sample. Then, for good measure, I got a pack of Eve Online band-aids and a carton of orange juice to take away. If in the future my blood sample makes its way to the moon in the form of an epic poem, it'll be much further than I'll have gotten during my living existence. I have no immediate plans to physically go to the moon--but if I've learned anything from the sheer dedication of Eve players, developers, and professional collaborators, it's to never say never.