Since North Carolina–based Epic Games released its Unreal Engine in 1995, the technology has been licensed to power hundreds of popular games on computers and video-game consoles. Epic's own game series, Gears of War, has been a smashing success, with more than 19 million games sold globally. Mark Rein, Epic's cofounder and vice president, tells PopMech what made Unreal Engine a top development tool for today's most advanced graphics applications.
How did Epic Games get started?
Tim Sweeney [Epic Games' founder, CEO, and technical director] started the company in his basement as a shareware game developer and publisher back in 1991. I joined Epic less than a year later, while it was still being operated in his basement. Together we built the company up to where it is today and assembled an amazing group of people to make it Epic, and we continue to love every minute of it. After 22 years, Epic is flourishing, and I proudly think we're doing our best work ever at this point in time.
How did you get your break in the industry?
Both of us were self-taught computer nerds from the earliest days of personal computing. Tim was a mechanical engineering student in college when he started the company. I was out in the corporate workforce building database applications for small and large enterprises, but doing some sales and marketing too. We didn't bother with these fancy titles, but Tim was essentially CEO, executive producer, and chief of technology. I mostly concentrated on the sales and marketing aspects of the business, but I also recruited some of our top talent.
How did the Unreal Engine come about?
The Unreal Engine started as Tim Sweeney was building an editor that would enable us to build 3D games. Eventually, he built the rest of the engine around the editor so that artists and designers could easily use the tools to make incredible, alive 3D game worlds. The kicker was that we had to be able to do this with smaller teams than any of our competitors, so the toolsand the workflow around those toolshad to be really powerful and productive.
Fast-forward almost 20 years, and today Unreal Engine technology is even more tools-and workflow-focused than ever before, which is why so many companies have licensed it to create so many amazing products.
At what point did you decide to license the Unreal Engine to other game developers?
The first decision was really about making the tools easy enough so that our players could pick them up and mod our game, the original Unreal, so we always tried to make tools that were polished. When other companies saw what we were doing with the tools, they asked if they could license them, and this is what launched the Unreal Engine licensing business.
Since the Unreal Engine was first launched, how many games have been made that use its technology?
Your guess is as good as mine. Let's say lots. In November 2009, we released the Unreal Development Kit, the free downloadable edition of Unreal Engine 3, and to date there have been more than 2 million unique installs. So it isn't possible to know exactly how many games have been made with all the various Unreal Engine releases over the years. From what I understand, more than 300 commercial games have shipped just with Unreal Engine 3.
How has the Unreal Engine changed over time?
The first Unreal Engine focused on constructive solid geometry for building game levels, and all the rendering was carried out through CPU (Central Processing Unit) instructions. Unreal Engine 2 targeted new GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), which eventually took 3D graphics mainstream.
With Unreal Engine 3, we really hit our stride with our engine team working in parallel with our games teams. That effort brought the feature-rich nature of the toolset to a new level, and as part of that evolution, our artists and designers began to outnumber programmers on our teams. In addition, we were able to achieve incredibly beautiful graphics with the arrival of programmable shaders, plus we overhauled multiple Unreal Engine systems to accommodate the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This ushered in a new wave of quality and creativity in our games, as well as those of our licensees, and this carried over to game-development budgets as well.
What kinds of games will we see run on the Unreal Engine 4?
Like with Unreal Engine 3, you're going to see all kinds of games built using Unreal Engine 4. In fact, I would wager you're going to see even more variety with Unreal Engine 4.
What features does the Unreal Engine 4 offer today that people may not have seen before?
There are a whole bunch of new technologies in Unreal Engine 4. One that stands out for me is our physically based materials and shading system, which provides tools that can be used to create ultrarealistic surfaces that look amazing and provide near-infinite surface detail. The new materials system lets artists layer paint on top of rust on top of metal, for example. Basically, you can apply almost any type of texture to an object and it looks amazing in Unreal Engine 4.
Outside of video and computer games, what else is powered by the Unreal Engine?
With Unreal Engine 3 we've seen many amazing uses outside of gaming. For example, the Michigan Department of Transportation contracted a visualization team at construction company Parsons Brinckerhoff to build a high-end driving simulator. Parsons Brinckerhoff also developed the Bay Bridge Explorer, a mobile app demonstrating new highway patterns during the reconstruction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
The Virtual Heroes, a military contractor, created a very successful health-human physiology engine called HumanSim, which can be used to train emergency medical first responders. Leading architectural firm HKS created a virtual walk-through of the Dallas Cowboys' stadium for planning purposes. The WB original web series Chadam is authored with Unreal Engine 3. With the increased power and flexibility of Unreal Engine 4, I expect we'll see even more adoption outside of gaming.