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.

The Journey From Concept to Reality

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.

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 Science Behind the Blood

"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.

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."

Preserving History in a New Form

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.

"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 into a form that would be as enduring and meaningful as the ancient Eddas. The Capsuleer Edda is not just a record of the game’s history—it's a tribute to the players who have shaped the Eve universe over the years, and a testament to the unique and often surreal culture that has grown around it.

From a moon trip to blood collection, the Capsuleer Edda project has become one of the strangest and most ambitious promotions in Eve Online’s history. And with the help of an unexpected expert, Fenris Creations is turning what once seemed like a wild idea into a reality that will be remembered for years to come.