Unreal Engine

 

thought to be a tiny industry only for

kids happy holidays from Atari has now

become one of the largest and fastest

growing industries in the world as of

2019 the video game industry is valued

at well over 100 billion dolars and is

bigger than both the film industry and

music industry combined but the gaming

business is not filled with a hundred

different gaming companies each

jockeying for position in the industry

in reality only a handful of companies

are responsible for nearly all of the

revenue that is produced from video

games and one of these companies is

still pretty much owned by one single

person this is the story about how one

man changed video games forever and

createda Titan of the video game

industry this is the story of epic games

Potter Mac Maryland 1989 a 19 year old

named Tim Sweeney was a busy

mechanical

engineering student at the University of

Maryland on weekends Tim would travel

back to his parents house in Potomac

Maryland to keep in touch with both his

family and his IBM personal computer onone of these weekends he decided to

open

up his own personal computer

consultation business where he would

help customers with any of their

computer problems he decided to call

this new business pata Mac computer

systems named after his hometown

however

after more than a year of very little

Success he decided to shut down the

Company and focus his weekends on

something else Tim always knew he

wanted

to do something revolving around

computers so he ended up deciding that

he would try to create a video game

however there was a problem even

though

Tim was pretty much an expert with

computers and computer programming

there

wasn't a real roadmap or instruction

manual on how to create video games at

the time nor were there any game

engines

to help him start program in his first

game so Tim Sweeney ended up creating

his own text editor in order to help him

Pro

drem his first game from scratch but

then a light bulb went off what if hejust made a video game out of the text

editor itself so that's what he did

the initial text editor that Tim made

ended up becoming a game called Z Z T

was an action-adventure puzzle game

that

was released for ms-dos in October of

1991 the game took nine months to

develop and when it was released it was

met with some initial success however

this was not necessarily because of the

game itself you see the game as ezt was

the first video game that was ever

developed using object-oriented

programming which made it very easy for

other programmers to change the game

as it is known today mod the game so

inadvertently Tim Sweeney's text editor

had become the first easily model game

where normal computer users could

create

their own game within a game soon ZZT

started making Sweeny over $100 a day

that is when he decided to make video

game development his full-time career he

renamed pata Mac computer systems to

epic megagames

in order to try to have a standout namein the video game industry at the time

there were only a few companies that

were making video games like Apogee

software and id Software these

companies

had just recently released their massive

hit games like Duke Nukem & Wolfenstein

3d

So Tim Sweeney had his work cut out for

him initially Tim brought on a handful

of people to help him grow the company

one of which was Mark Raine who

according to Tim was vital to the

initial growth of epic games because of

the business deals he was able to bring

in early on in the company's history by

the end of its first year epic megagames

had 20 employees and had produced six

games and by the end of the second year

they had 30 employees and produced in

nine more games the company was

growing

fairly quickly yet their game-changing

product was yet to be released in 1995first-person shooter game however he

began building this game with a brand

new idea in mind he decided to program

a

game engine that would not only work for

his game but could also work for

variety of other future games that way

this game engine could be licensed out

to other game developers to bring in

additional revenue for the company

now the creation of this game engine

was

a big risk for Sweeney because building

a game engine like this would take years

to program and the engine might not

even

be that good at the end of it

so by starting this project he was

placing a big bet on himself

and his ability to program and after

three years of programming Tim

Sweeney's

video game called unreal was released to

the world and so was his game engine

that he called Unreal Engine within two

weeks the game unreal became the

best-selling game in the country andhaving revolutionary visuals while at

the same time receiving praise for its

good plot atmosphere and gameplay

unreal

ended up making the company around 60

million dollars throughout its lifetime

and for a few weeks actually competed

with Starcraft as the best-selling game

in the world however this would pale in

comparison to what the Unreal Engine

would do for the company the engine that

Sweeney spent three years programming

was praised by nearly everyone in the

industry including competitors such as

John Carmack who was the creator of

games like doom and quake and this

praise was for a multitude of reasons

like how the engine was able to use

textures its lighting quality and the

ability to export games to nearly every

computer and console on the market with

just the click of a button after its

release