In August 2003 the Digital Media Collaboratory (DMC) of the Innovation Creativity and Capital Institute (IC2) at the University of Texas held its second annual GameDev conference. The focus of the 2003 conference was artificial intelligence, and consequently the 207683-21-4 invited several Ph.D. students from the Neural Networks Research Group at the University's Department of Computer Science (UTCS) to make presentations on state-of-the-art academic AI research with potential game applications.

The GameDev conference also held break-out sessions where groups brainstormed ideas for innovative games, and in one of the sessions Ken Stanley proposed an idea for a game based on a real-time variant of his previously published NEAT learning algorithm. On the basis of Ken's proposal the DMC/IC2 resolved to staff and fund a project to create a professional-quality demo of the game. (See production credits.) The resulting NERO project started in October 2003 and has continued through the present, generating several spin-off research projects in its wake. (See bibliography.)