EVE Online's Foundational Poem Will Be Made The Old Fashioned Way - With Flesh And Blood

CCP Games announced its Foundational Poem for EVE Online during EVE Fanfest, and today the company announced another wrinkle to this plan: it will be made in literal flesh and blood.

During the EVE Fanfest Opening Ceremony yesterday, CCP Games announced a Foundational Poem inspired by the epic Sagas of Iceland. Today in an interview with MMORPG.com, CCP's CEO Hilmar Viegar Petursson shed a little more light on exactly how New Eden's own Epic Poem will take shape.

"This is something I've been toying around with for five years, and it's in the vein of Forever," Hilmar tells me. "And it so happens that blood on cowskin is a very good way to store information." 

He goes on to talk about he can still go and read the original Icelandic Sagas written a thousand years ago with literal flesh and blood, and how that has a permenance that digital information just doesn't have.

As a result, the idea of a Foundational Poem for EVE Online and New Eden's history being preserved in the same way started to take shape.

The idea is to get poems from around the world that will enshrine the edicts and culture of New Eden, from sayings like "Fly Safe" or "the Friendship Machine" to the escapades of the players themselves. These will all be put down on literal skin, written in blood to be preserved, in theory, for the next thousand years. 

The twist here: the cow skin isn't coming from a live cow, but rather it's grown from Stem cells, while the blood will be sourced from the literal lifeblood of New Eden: the players. There is something incredibly poetic about the literal lifeblood of EVE Online - its players - helping to donate the blood that will go into the creation of this Foundational Poem, and I also love the idea of using this as a way to help a good cause with an actual blood drive for the Blood Bank of Iceland.

On stage today during EVE Fanfest's closing ceremony, Hilmar made this announcement that he's hoping that next year's Fanfest will see a blood drive benefitting the Blood Bank of Iceland. And then to take a little to incorporate into the Foundational Poem itself. And, in true EVE Online fashion, we might even see some EVE cosplay with the phlebotomists cosplaying Blood Raiders.

The book itself will be made into three copies made by a company that has, as Hilmar put it on stage today, a "lineage of doing this for a thousand years." This company still does this for the British and the Vatican. And now CCP Games.

"And now they work for us," Hilmar said with a laugh.

Those three copies will be distributed to three locations - one here in Iceland next to the actual Icelandic Foundational Poems, and two more locations which Hilmar says hasn't been decided on just yet, for the redundancy. This is all in service of the mantra at CCP Games of EVE Forever, where the MMO, its world and history, its culture, and everything inbetween outlives us all.

It isn't going to be cheap, so the company is will also be selling regular, non-flesh and blood versions of the Poem at some point. 

It's been a wild weekend here at EVE Fanfest, with the company announcing EVE Online Legion, the first expansion of 2025 coming later this month, while its FPS, EVE Vanguard got a release window of Summer 2026 for early access. A playtest is coming this September.