Their future is Epic: The evolution of a gaming giant
May 2, 2016“At our wedding, I got one of the last photos of the three of us together. It might be the last hurrah of us while we still worked together.”
In it, four beaming faces, all wide-eyed and smiling, look directly into the camera.
There’s Mark Rein, Epic Games’ co-founder and deal maker, leaning in from the left side, a genuinely happy look on his still boyish face. Tim Sweeney, employee number one and the other founder of Epic, leans slightly away from the camera, head almost imperceptibly tilted down, smiling. And in between the two founders is Cliff Bleszinski, arm wrapped around new wife Lauren, bow tie shining under a stubbled chin.
“That photo was right before the transition,” Bleszinski says.
On Aug. 4, 2012, the wedding photo booth captured a quiet, personal moment in the midst of what became a massive metamorphosis for Epic.
The month before, Tencent purchased 40 percent of the company. Months later, Bleszinski and a slew of other important figures left to retire, to start over, to find better fits.
It’s all led to what Sweeney calls the biggest change in the 25-year-old company’s history: Epic 4.0.
The most recent, still unfurling version of Epic Games now wants to be what Bleszinski calls a “multi-headed hydra of technology.”
For gaming, this latest change brings Epic almost full circle, back to a place where it deals directly with the people who play its creations. At least, that’s the plan.
But now there is much more to Epic than just game making. There is the necessity of virtual reality, technology that many at Epic say will be an integral part of the company’s future. There is Epic’s now free up-front development engine, which they say is incredibly profitable. There is the company’s push into television and movies, a move powered by that same development engine, which Epic says can now create lifelike models in real time for 3D and virtual reality needs. And then there is everything else, from the company’s work with NASA to its recent deal involving using the engine to design elements of Walt Disney theme parks.
Nearly four years after the move to 4.0, the company is ready to explain how the Epic of Gears of War and Bulletstorm is becoming the Epic of … well, everything.
Re-evolution
It’s not just you.
Epic Games has changed — in ways the company believes will mark the emergence of a new sort of game industry. But this latest era of Epic isn’t the first time the company has evolved.
Surviving for this long, says Tim Sweeney, requires change. He estimates that Epic Games should have already died three times, but a willingness to evolve and the constant support of the Unreal Engine has saved the company repeatedly.
As Sweeney tells it, the ongoing metamorphosis of Epic Games is one driven by business acumen and attention to finance, but listen to anyone else and you’ll hear it’s Sweeney’s foresight that powers the motion of the North Carolina studio.
“I mean, I don’t know if you’ve heard this part of the story, but Tim has this concept of Epic 1.0, Epic, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0,” says Paul Meegan, Epic’s president.
Each iteration of Epic marks a new era for the company, the thinking goes and our cover illustration shows. Each era has a specific focus, a key partner company and an approach to development.
While the company’s telling of its history neatly matches that philosophy, it does leave out some of Epic’s experiments and failures over its 25 years. In its early days, Epic tried its hand as a publisher, putting out games developed by Safari Software, for instance. Epic also partnered up with EA, Midway and others during the era that it had success publishing with Microsoft.
In 2007 Too Human developer Silicon Knights sued Epic, accusing the company of using money it earned by selling licenses to their Unreal Engine 3 game engine to fund the development of Gears of War, rather than improve the game engine for other developers. In 2014, Silicon Knights lost its case and Epic won a counterclaim alleging breach of agreement, infringement of copyright and misappropriation of trade secrets. Epic was awarded $9 million in a decision that was later upheld by a federal appeals court.
Sometimes Epic’s shifts were so sudden they led to what could only be called bad business decisions.
Big Huge Games was founded in 2000 by Brian Reynolds, Tim Train, David Inscore and Jason Coleman, and acquired by THQ in 2008. When THQ went under, 38 Studios picked the team up. In May 2012, 38 Studios, struggling to stay afloat, laid off the staff.
In less than a month, Epic swooped in and hired the team, turning it into, first, Epic Baltimore and then Impossible Studios. Epic shuttered Impossible about six months later.
Former Impossible employees declined to comment about the six-month stint with Epic. One said that saying anything about those months would break a separation agreement that included a line about disparaging the company.
After Epic upped the team, the company put them to work on turning an Infinity Blade dungeons game that was prototyped during a game jam into a full-blown title.
“We brought them on and gave them the task of building that game out,” Sweeney says. “But that relationship really didn’t fit. They were great, but our way of collaborating just didn’t work.”
Sweeney blames the whole thing on timing. Epic had to make a decision quickly, before the team disbanded and went its separate ways, and it decided to go for it without going through the typical process of figuring out if the team would fit into Epic’s culture.
He says the shift to 4.0 was also responsible.
“It’s all connected.”
Sweeney himself balks at the idea that there was always a neat plan for his company’s growth, though he does repeatedly describe in detail where he sees the industry and the company headed over the next decade.
“In retrospect,” he says, “I guess it looked like a plan.”
What he describes, while trying to dodge credit for the shifts in the company’s nature and its ability to survive so long as an independent, is more about chasing the money than it is about leading with innovation.
“At each [transition] we recognized our existing business was running into the limits of what the game industry could support,” Sweeney says. “Our current approach was being made inviable by industry forces.”
He says he started out as a shareware developer, making games he sold through the mail or old dial-in bulletin board systems, because that was where the opportunity was at the time. “It was the only way I could make money.”
By the late ’90s, the company had expanded from 15 employees to 25, and with that expansion came a need to make bigger games to support the bigger payroll. Epic moved into making big PC games with “serious” budgets, Sweeney says. “That required selling a couple million copies for each game.”
So the team began working with publishers to help float its games to success.
“That whole era ended as PC piracy impacted the market and made single-player campaign games impossible,” he says. “We estimated at one point that, for every game we sold, four copies were pirated.”
And so Epic shifted again, this time to the console market with the help of Microsoft and an exclusive publishing deal. Gears of War started out as a tremendous success for everyone involved, Sweeney says.
“The very first Gears of War game cost $12 million to develop, and it made about $100 million in revenue,” he says. “It was very profitable.”
But those profits continued to shrink as the cost to make each succeeding game went up and the revenue generally didn’t.
“By the end of the cycle, Gears of War 3 cost about four or five times more than the original to make,” he says. “The profit was shrinking and shrinking. We calculated that, if we built Gears of War 4, the budget would have been well over $100 million, and if it was a huge success, we could break even. Anything less could put us out of business.
“That’s what caused us to move and change business models.”
It wasn’t just Gears 4 that pushed that change; it was also issues that arose while working on Gears of War: Judgment.
“When we released Gears of War: Judgment, a bunch of community players were complaining about all the multiplayer levels we created. We realized that, you know, there are some problems with this, we should rework it, create a bunch of new content and release multiplayer around a new game just like we did in the project that was the genesis of Unreal Tournament,” Sweeney says. “We had all these plans to do this, and so we went to Microsoft and we said, ‘Hey, we want to do this.’ And they said ‘No, you don’t want to do that.’
“We weren’t asking them for money, but you know as our publisher and proprietor of Xbox, it didn’t fit into their business plans and so they said no. That made me realize very clearly the risk of having a publisher or anybody standing between game developers and gamers — and how toxic and destructive that process could be to the health of a game and its community.”
Around the same time, Epic began to recognize that one of its projects, a game originally designed as a small indie title called Fortnite, could thrive under a free-to-play, ever evolving system.
As these things lined up, the decision to change the company began to grow out of a deep sense of foreboding.
“I would describe it as seeing the writing on the wall,” Sweeney says. “There was an increasing realization that the old model wasn’t working anymore and that the new model was looking increasingly like the way to go.”
Sweeney describes the new model as the one embraced by Valve with its digital distribution and early access games and by Riot Games with League of Legends‘ take on the ever-evolving games as a service platform.
“It boiled down to a decision: What do we do with our company? Do we enter into a new generation of publisher agreement and continue the way we were?” he says. “We ruled that out fairly soon after Gears of War 3 was released.
“We realized that the business really needed to change its approach quite significantly. We were seeing some of the best games in the industry being built and operated as live games over time rather than big retail releases. We recognized that the ideal role for Epic in the industry is to drive that, and so we began the transition of being a fairly narrow console developer focused on Xbox to being a multi-platform game developer and self publisher, and indie on a larger scale.”
But to do that, to make this latest transition, Epic Games needed time and money.
“So we did a bunch of pretty crazy things,” Sweeney says. “For the first time in Epic’s history, we brought in an outside investor, Tencent, who put money into the company and also has provided an enormous amount of useful advice.”
In June 2012, Tencent purchased about 48 percent of Epic’s outstanding shares, or roughly 40 percent of the company, for $330 million. Along with a sizable chunk of the company, Tencent also picked up the right to have two representatives on Epic’s seven-person board of directors. But Sweeney says that has no real impact on the games the team makes.
“Epic Games is incorporated and has a board of directors that make[s] major financial decisions about the company but doesn’t involve itself in the design or product development of games,” he says. “It made sense at that point in our history after 25 years to do that and we thought that that was the way to really reliably establish Epic in this generation. We realized this would be a big leap. In the past, we had done a publishing deal with Microsoft that had brought in enough funding to operate the company for several years and Tencent’s involvement in Epic had a similar effect on our ability to make this massive change and make this huge leap without the immediate fear of money.”
Tencent, Sweeney is quick to point out, is the number one operator of live games in the world, the number one game publisher in China and the number three internet company in the world. “They’re not a game developer,” he says. “Their expertise is how to operate these games on the large scale and to really appeal to customers, and we found that their values are very similar to ours and that we had a great deal we could learn from them.”
Looking back over the company’s quarter-of-a-century history, Sweeney says that each transition has one thing in common: “We’ve always looked for a partner to help us to achieve the things for Epic that are very difficult of themselves.”
In the shift to Epic 2.0, the company leaned on publisher GT Interactive. In the shift to consoles and 3.0, Epic partnered with Microsoft. For this generation, Epic’s white knight is Tencent.
“Tencent is not our publisher here but our investor and our publisher in China,” he says.
By mid-2012, Epic Games was flush with cash and on the cusp of change but still hadn’t completely committed to this new route.
“We weren’t at the point where we wanted to blaze down this new path yet,” Sweeney says.
But then came Rod Fergusson, former executive producer and director of production on Gears of War. Fergusson left Epic in 2012, shortly after the Tencent investment.
He came back to Epic not to work there but to ask a question.
“He was at 2K and inquired about the possibility of building a Gears game,” Sweeney said. “We discussed that with 2K and also with Microsoft, who of course was the publisher of the existing Gears games. Microsoft won the deal, and then recruited Rod to The Coalition to lead development.”
“It was also our moment of realizing we were really going down this new path.”
Epic luminaries on why they left
It ended one summer night in 2012 after a stroll along a North Carolina beach.
Cliff Bleszinski, Epic’s protégé game maker and the face of the popular Gears of War franchise, had grown frustrated with the development process for retail games. Jaded about the game industry and recently flush with cash, he had simply stopped going to work at Epic.
“I tried to renegotiate my contract and we couldn’t come to terms,” Bleszinski says. “A lot of jadedness happened. I was so fed up with the development process. I felt like I needed to retire.”
Bleszinski, who started working at Epic when he was 17, retreated to his beach house along the shores of North Carolina, seemingly stuck between his desire to make games and an increasing sense of unhappiness.
“Tim Sweeney called one day and said that we needed to talk,” Bleszinski says. “I told him that I was down at the coast and he said, ‘I’m down here too.'”
Sweeney came, but not as Bleszinski’s boss and not to antagonize him. He came as a concerned friend.
“He’s always been a big brother to me,” Bleszinski says. “We went for a stroll on the beach at night. He told me where Epic was going and said, ‘You either need to call it or get back to work.'”
Bleszinski says he slept on it: “The next day I woke up and wrote my resignation letter.”
Despite being a sort of phoenix, a company fueled by semiregular immolation, reinventing itself each time to become something bigger and better, Epic still seemed to stagger a bit under the most recent evolution.
Bleszinski says money was certainly involved in his ultimate decision to leave.
“I sold a bunch of stock and had a bunch of money,” he says. Faced with his own burnout surrounding the process of making games and the upcoming shift from making boxed games to creating “living products,” Bleszinski says he decided to leave.
Initially, he retired.
He did a lot of reading, he says. He hung out with his new wife and enjoyed their time together. But he couldn’t quite let go of gaming.
“I would still go to GDC and what not,” he says. “And I missed having a product to work on. I missed, like Lady Gaga said, I missed the applause. Like having people tell me what they liked about the game. Of course I liked the money, but the applause, that’s the most rewarding thing.
“Video games are in my blood.”
About a year and a half later, Bleszinski came out of retirement to start his own studio, Boss Key Productions, just down the way from Epic’s North Carolina headquarters.
Mike Capps, the long-time president of Epic, also left, saying that he too was retiring — not out of frustration but to spend more time with his newly born child. He declined to comment for this story. Rod Fergusson, the executive producer on Gears of War, left as well. He initially went to Irrational Games where he helped Ken Levine and team wrap up BioShock Infinite and eventually moved over to the new studio created by Microsoft to make more Gears games. Microsoft declined to comment for this story on his behalf.
Adrian Chmielarz left the same month Fergusson did. Chmielarz joined Epic in early 2012 when it purchased his studio People Can Fly. Chmielarz says that his decision to leave Epic was fueled by the company’s vision of the future.
“We could not talk about the details of that vision at the time of our exit, but today it is no longer a secret — just look at what Paragon and Fortnite are,” he says via email. “We neither fit that vision nor were interested in pursuing it. To be clear, it’s not that we think there’s anything wrong with the direction that Epic has chosen; time will only tell if it was the right decision. It’s just that other things excite us.”
Chmielarz says that Epic no longer needed an external studio that specialized in the sort of story-heavy, single-player, expensive games that the company wasn’t making anymore.
“We had plans of our own, plans that were incompatible with what Epic wanted to do,” he says. “There was only one way out of that and the solution was very simple: We shook hands and parted ways.”
When Chmielarz left, he and a few of his co-workers formed a new studio: The Astronauts. In 2015, the remaining People Can Fly team broke off from Epic, reforming as a standalone studio but still doing contract work for Epic.
Sweeney said Epic originally started working with People Can Fly because it was impressed with the team’s work on shooter Painkiller. Epic had the team help with the Gears of War games and then, in 2011, had it develop the over-the-top shooter Bulletstorm. When 2012 hit, Epic brought the team, along with members from a lot of other teams, to help on Fortnite.
“They did some great work, but they really wanted to build a major game in their studio,” Sweeney says. “We didn’t fit with that idea. They came to us with a proposal to split off and it made sense.”
Chmielarz says he’s happy with how things eventually turned out.
“Leaving People Can Fly after 10 years of blood, sweat and tears was hard, but after three years of The Astronauts, it’s clear to us we perform better when we’re 100 percent on our own,” he says. “We treat those five years we spent with Epic as an invaluable lesson in, well, everything — from quality standards to business dealings. Starting a new studio with all the knowledge and experience felt great, even if it was nerve-wracking. But we got to make The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and not only that was super satisfying but also set us up financially for years to come.”
At least one group of long-time Epic employees decided that the transition to Epic 4.0 made the company a place they no longer wanted to work.
Lee Perry worked on all three Gears of War games and several Unreal Tournament titles over his 10 and a half years with the company. But in early 2012, after working his way up to lead designer, he left with a group of five senior employees to form a new studio called Bitmonster.
“We had lofty business goals, but each of us had different personal factors for leaving, obviously,” he told me in a recent interview. “For me, I didn’t feel I had a seat at the ‘creative table’ in a bigger sense (with discussions like which game concepts we would greenlight, etc.), and creative legroom is about the most important thing in my career.
“The other major factor was the company size. When I started at Epic a decade earlier, there were 17 people, and when we left, it was around 200. The sense of being a tight family where everyone personally knew each other — that was just not surviving the major hiring waves and company purchases.”
As the head count grew, Perry said, so did the number of people dedicated to management, and he feels that changed the company’s entire creative process “dramatically.”
“Were all the changes for the worse? Definitely not,” he said. “But it was clearly a different working environment in the last two years than it was for the first eight.
“Epic became a ‘real company’ instead of a group of eccentric devs, and there’s nothing wrong with that fundamentally, depending on who you ask.”
The higher headcount also meant that Epic needed to essentially become less risk averse, something the company also told me.
“Free to play makes sense for their position,” Perry says. “There’s a higher cap for potential profits, and the higher stakes are basically required to support such a large company. You either place a lot of smaller bets, or you place a couple big ones … and they’re swinging for the fences.
“You can’t ‘play it safe’ with an old school AAA game while you burn enough cash every month to pay 500+ people worldwide.”
Despite his decision to leave, Perry still thinks highly of Epic and its leadership.
“The simple truth is that there’s a ton of talent there, and Tim and Mark are sharp guys; it’s easy to look back nostalgically, but it’s always a really bad play to bet against them,” he said. “Epic is in the business of pulling miracles out of their ass — it just happens over and over. The new Epic is banking on it as much as the old.
“From the Epic owner’s point of view, reshaping the company paid off beyond wildest expectations, but it’s impossible to look back and not long for what the Epic family once was. The industry doesn’t have these garage-sized id and Epic standout ‘gem’ studios anymore. I’m not sure why that shift happened, but it’s incredibly sad, like the whole of gaming culture lost something special. I’m glad I had a part of it, though.”
Looking back at 2012 and the changes that year brought with it, Sweeney doesn’t question his decision on the change in strategy, though he was surprised by the impact it had on the company’s makeup.
“I wasn’t expecting anything to happen,” he said. “I think the strategy was right. But I wish I could have done more to sustain some of those people. They were making a decision about the future of their lives. Making those decisions was probably doing what was right for them.
“I totally understand and respect that.”
Sweeney remembers that last walk on the beach with Bleszinski, too.
“It was good. It really made me understand where Cliff was coming from,” he says. “He had been working for Epic for 20 years — since he was 17. Like, that might have been a violation of some child labor laws in California.
“I’m grateful for all the work he and Mike Capps and the others did while they were here.”
Epic’s latest: Paragon, Fortnite and Unreal Tournament
Epic may never release a single-player, campaign driven game like Gears of War or Bulletstorm again. Those games, in Sweeney’s eyes, are now for major publishers to develop or finance and then release.
“The economics of those games forces developers to work with major publishers to succeed, and that seems to be irreversible,” he says.
In the eyes of Epic, the future for companies like Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft or Electronic Arts is either small and focused or big, online and persistent, which makes gamers hungry for ever-evolving entertainment.
For Epic’s new, singular focus, that means three titles: survival game Fortnite, shooter Unreal Tournament and MOBA Paragon. Each of these games is the epitome — some more, some less — of what it means to be an Epic Games 4.0 title.
“Certainly we can support three or four games, big games,” Sweeney says. “We will also see lots of smaller games.”
Over the course of Epic’s decades-long history, Sweeney says, each new version of the company has been revealed through a single game. The original game for the first phase of the company was Sweeney’s role-playing and game creation experiment ZZT. For Epic Games 2.0 in 1998, it was Unreal, a shooter that took three and a half years to develop and was “never more than six months away from shipping.” For 3.0 in 2006, it was Gears of War.
“That started out as a small team nurtured by a small team,” Sweeney says. “It was originally set in the Unreal universe and called Unreal Warfare. It started out as a first-person shooter but ended up as a third-person game in an entirely new universe, new fiction and new graphic style. That was a three and a half year process, too.”
While that era of Epic influenced Fortnite, a game that straddled the transition from 3.0 to 4.0, Sweeney says the game that best represents Epic’s new approach to development is Paragon.
“It’s a clear picture of Epic’s values,” he says. “It’s not like the retail era where a game went from God to Epic to gamers. The team is constantly listening to gamers. This is being developed very much in partnership with them.”
Paragon started out more as an opportunity than a game.
In 2012, John Wasilczyk was fresh off a two-year stint working on Call of Duty games with Infinity Ward when he started working at Epic as a producer. Steve Superville, who had been with Epic for 14 years, struck up a conversation and the two started talking about games Wasilczyk needed to check out. Epic was given a chance to create an entirely new game and the only real rule was that it needed to be an “awesome multiplayer game.”
The two talked about DOTA, League of Legends and other multiplayer-centric titles. The duo got a small team together and spent a year working on it.
“A full year of just mashing up different game ideas, using different ingredients,” Wasilczyk says. “That is something that I’ve never had the chance to do. Well, usually you get a few months, then it’s ‘Good, bang out a game.’ In this case we could spend a lot more time experimenting a ton with different things.”
Each night, the team members would gather together to discuss the different sorts of games they played, telling stories about their experiences. Quickly, Superville saw that the more traditional, scripted games resulted in the same stories of the same experiences from the team.
“But the stories that were coming out of MOBAs were about interplay between players and characters and they were creating these narratives that were really captivating,” Superville says. “So much so that the great plays were talked about weeks after they’d actually happened.”
That got the team to start examining MOBAs. Why were they so successful? What could Epic add to the formula if it made its own?
“We figured we had an action gaming background, and MOBAs are currently top down, and they’re action-based, but you’re currently separated from your character. And so we decided, ‘Let’s give it a shot and prototype bringing down the camera,'” says Superville, who is now the creative director on the game.
The result is a game that walks the line between an action third-person game and a strategic MOBA and looks like a playable cutscene. Early reactions, while mostly positive, seem to question how the game will set itself apart in so flooded a genre and whether the game’s system for powering up heroes using cards will work.
Internally, what makes the game stand as an example of Epic Games 4.0 isn’t how it looks or plays but how it was released. Paragon is a free-to-play game released to the public before it was finished. Instead of trying to make a polished, boxed game, the Paragon team released the title so they could get the most important aspect of development started: communicating with players.
Paragon was released for online tests late last year, and the build those testers were playing was about three days behind what developers were playing at the studio.
“That means that they are right on our heels,” Wasilczyk says, “which is great because we know, we learned really early on in Gears, that the community will have better players than developers.
“The other thing we learned is that the way we play isn’t the way that the larger population will play.”
Gears taught Epic that no matter how balanced an online game may seem at launch, it likely isn’t. The first weekend of launch for the original Gears showed that 80 percent of kills were coming from one weapon, a sure sign of a balancing issue.
“We knew that we’d never have a team that’s as large as the community,” Wasilczyk says. “So we decided to just engage with them as early as possible. That means doing things like turning on features before they are fully done, as there is no reason to finish them if the community goes, ‘That’s not what we want.’ We save a lot of time and they feel invested and it’s a great partnership.”
While the team is confident that it was the right decision to deliberately release an unfinished game, it was still a hard adjustment to make.
“I think, just mindset-wise, that was probably one of the biggest challenges,” Superville says. “The group that started on this project [is] all people who, for the most part, worked on Gears and worked at Epic for a long time. You get used to that cycle of, you’re going to work for three straight years in total silence and hope that it all turns out perfectly. Then you put it in a box and give it to someone and if they don’t like it, you’re kind of left flat footed because you don’t have the time to make changes.”
With the knowledge that Paragon launched as a work in progress also comes the concept that even when “finished,” the team’s work will never be done.
“I think that’s part of the excitement, knowing that the game is never really finished and kind of dragged from your hands,” Wasilczyk says. “Having it be something that grows and changes over time was something we intended to happen right from the very beginning.”
The new workflow also opens the door to a lot more creativity, allowing the team to quickly pop in prototyped ideas or switch out elements, he says.
While the game is free to play, it does have a way of making money: skins and characters. Paragon went live in March with a baker’s dozen of characters. (Compare that to League of Legends, which has more than 120.) There’s a lot of room for Paragon to grow and a lot of opportunity for the game to make money without chiseling away at the core experience for those players not interested in spending.
While Paragon is the title Sweeney sees as the best example of this latest era for his studio, it’s not the first game he counts as part of the new era. That’s Fortnite, a game that started development just as Epic was starting to puzzle out what path the company would take next.
Survival action game Fortnite is currently in its fourth year of development, but Sweeney promises it’s the game coming out next.
“Paragon ended up being an easier game to design than Fortnite because it’s based on a fairly known formula,” he says. Fortnite also straddles the line between Epic 3.0 and 4.0.
Fortnite started out as a game meant for Xbox arcade. But Sweeney says the company quickly recognized in the game an opportunity to significantly build out some of the game’s systems and to turn it into a title with a long, evolving life.
Now, it seems, after evolving from a short, small arcade game, to a drawn-out survival title, Fortnite seems to be aiming for the same sort of audience as Ubisoft’s The Division and Bungie’s Destiny. Sweeney says the game is in the same category. That would mean a game that seamlessly shifts between single player and massively multiplayer while providing gamers with a living world. Both Destiny and The Division endured prolonged development but didn’t go through the same shifting goals as Fortnite.
That could explain Fortnite‘s prolonged development.
“We didn’t realize how long it would take to develop the game,” Sweeney says. “It’s been a major learning process.”
A learning process like the ones that led to the first Unreal and Gears of War, he adds.
Darren Sugg, lead designer on Fortnite for about four years now, calls the game a kind of test case. As Epic’s online ambitions grew, so did Fortnite‘s, he says.
What started out as a relatively small undertaking is now a genre-mashing action building game with “fairly deep RPG elements,” Sugg says. As the game continues to grow and change, it seems to become more difficult for the people working on it to describe what, exactly, it is.
Asked to do just that, Sugg responds:
“Our best estimate is it’s an action building game with deep RPG elements,” he says. “That being basically defined as what we think building should be: quick, fun, easy and creative. We want strong action gameplay, so if you like to shoot, melee, move around and be in an awesome 3-D scape, you can do that. If you’re a player that enjoys RPG mechanics, we combine all that together into a fortress defense. So over the years, we’ve tried to bring it down to a few simple phrases but it always grows just a little bit bigger than that. Back in the day, we were like, ‘Oh, it’s a super-sized horde mode.’ But then we were like, ‘Yeah, but as it is now, it doesn’t describe how we blew up the RPG in the way that we did.’ We’ve talked about other analogs that are pretty defense based, but none of them had a procedurally generated world so that didn’t describe the scope that we had.”
Four years into development with the title seemingly ever growing, it’s easy to wonder if it will ever be done.
“I don’t think, in the modern age, that online games are ever done,” Sugg says. “I think it’s an evolution: more polish, more features, things that players want we get to put into the game. We get to react to what they want as they play the game. I don’t think most games will be done, as long as we have the ability to update them and the players are interested in us doing it.”
And releasing the game won’t slow its development.
“We’ll still be developing content for it. We’ll continue to support Fortnite for as long as there is interest from the community to do that,” Sugg said. “We have a feature backlog that we’ve been gathering from the community all the way back to almost a year ago, and we go through the things that are high bang for your buck and add them into the game as we can and harden some of the game’s systems.”
In terms of making money off of the game, Epic hasn’t announced that yet. Sugg, though, has his own ideas.
“We haven’t said what we’re going to be doing about that quite yet, but we have a model I would say that is pretty close to a Hearthstone model where we allow players to buy cards through the system, and they can earn that currency by playing the game.”
Because Fortnite started when Epic’s vision for its latest version of itself was still being formed, the game has been a sort of vanguard for this new approach.
“Fortnite has been right in the thick of things,” Sugg said. “Fortnite was the initial guide through the door to build out technology, and that’s been enabling us to gain greater velocity with whatever we’ve worked on since.”
It’s because of Fortnite that Epic Games first created a launcher, adding the ability to patch live games early on, and Fortnite led to a deeper examination of how Epic supports games online in general.
While Fortnite and Paragon are the first two entirely new IPs coming from the new Epic, the latest Unreal Tournament shows the most noticeable difference from the Epic of old. Where the original Unreal was a boxed project, this version was deliberately released incomplete and is being essentially co-developed with fans.
Epic teased Unreal Tournament, the latest version of the company’s flagship first-person shooter, on May 2, 2014, about a week before it started working on the game.
The shooter is a product of open development with a team of 12 regularly updating two versions of the game. One build is sent out to Epic’s game launcher for anyone to play for free and another is sent to GitHub, where gamers can play around with the developer build still in progress.
The project started with just six people working on it, under the assumption that the game would be created hand in hand with hobbyist developers and fans.
Where a game like Paragon or Fortnite has 50 to 100 internal quality assurance staff working on it, Unreal Tournament has just three.
“So our community is our QA team; our community is our development team,” Epic Games principal designer Jim Brown says. “People who play the development build can play exactly the same stages as they are in development and give us feedback on levels and everything. People who play the game build really vet it as if it were a fully shipped game, so we can test some of the larger retention systems and leveling.
“It’s really interesting as they are kind of along on this ride with us. They are not approaching it as ‘Hey, this is a shipped game.’ They are giving us very useful feedback and then they can see the impact of that immediately.”
Brown says he doesn’t think the game is quite yet ready to leave alpha, despite being playable by anyone who wants to download it. It’s missing the breadth of maps, weapons and characters that it would need to move on, he says. The matchmaking systems aren’t quite finished, and it’s not as stable as they’d like it to be.
“Also at that point we’ll have something that’s new, something that’s modernizing the franchise and brings it to speak to modern gamers so it’s not just speaking to the older UT fans,” Brown says. “Once we nail that, that’s when we hope to start building and growing beyond beta.”
While making money is, of course, important for any game — and Unreal Tournament will likely make its money through skins — it seems this game has a bigger purpose.
“It’s interesting because there are our individual goals, our game goals, our company goals,” Brown says. “In terms of the company, we want a successful game that builds the audience for the Epic Games brand.”
Above all else is Epic’s desire to build an audience on its relatively new game launcher. It’s through the game launcher that players will access Fortnite, Paragon and Unreal Tournament. Going to the launcher will also give Epic a chance to promote all of its titles.
“We appear in the launcher, so when you go to play Paragon, you’ll see the Unreal tab,” Brown says. “When you go to play Fortnite you’ll see Paragon. So it’s kinda like folding everybody into this Epic community. Building that friends list, that social connection and getting people to play your games. Which is huge.”
The future is Unreal (Engine)
In 2015, Epic surprised the game industry by dropping the monthly charge for its incredibly popular game engine and giving it away to anyone who wanted it: hobbyists, scientists, artists, architects, game makers.
It was a gamble, but not one based on just a gut instinct — and perhaps it was a gamble prodded along by Unreal Engine’s long-running competition with Unity and its own significant price drops. Tim Sweeney knew that Epic’s 2014 decision to drop the typically upfront high cost of licensing a game engine and charge a monthly subscription fee instead had resulted in a spike in Unreal Engine use.
This second, bigger bet paid off too.
“Last year was our best engine year ever,” Sweeney says. “By a significant margin.
“Anybody who downloads the engine uses it under a standard license, which is a five percent royalty. But you can also talk to us and if you’re going [for a] large-scale project — we have the ability to develop custom terms which typically involve negotiating a lower royalty in exchange for paying some money upfront.”
A limited form of Unity was made free prior to Epic’s announcement of a subscription approach to the engine. Following that move, Unity’s engine became completely free to developers making less than $100,000, and after that there is a flat fee.
Despite the competitive back and forth, it couldn’t have been an easy decision to make: essentially throwing away all the established fees on the chance that royalties would make up the difference.
The Unreal Engine, while maybe not as well known by players as Epic’s games, has always been the safety net for a company that likes to reinvent itself every half decade or so.
“The engine has been a stabilizing factor,” Sweeney says. “This technology and having so many partners. If we didn’t have the engine, we would have died. We would have died three times.”
For Epic to work, Sweeney says, it has to build games that make its engine better and release new versions of the engine, which allows it to make better games.
“The company has always been built on the synergy between developing games and technology,” he says. “The complexity to the technology we build is so high, it will be insane to try to build it and separate it from any game business, and we’re always trying to push forward with the absolute capabilities of the hardware. I think that’s what’s defined Epic also historically.”
Fortunately for Epic, it turns out that making a 3D engine that anybody can download for free opened up a lot of doors for the company, doors even it didn’t realize existed.
“The Unreal Engine community were tight knit in the past,” Sweeney says. “Super hard core AAA developers used it to build major games and we knew that market well. There have proved to be a huge number of indies who are incredibly talented and even come from AAA backgrounds, many of whom are getting started for the very first time and are doing amazing things that would have traditionally flown under our radar.”
Take Steam megahit Ark: Survival Evolved, for example. The team behind that dino survival game was able to build an early version of the title in less than nine months using Unreal.
“It’s made vast amounts of money for them and for us too,” Sweeney says.
While Sweeney says Epic knew that making the engine free upfront would attract a community of indie developers, what the company underestimated was how many of those developers would actually succeed at making awesome things.
“Ark is a real phenomenon and they weren’t the only ones,” he says. “Rocket League has been heavily successful using Unreal engine. Psyonix, these awesome developers we’ve known for a long time, their company was in trouble and they had a small amount of time to make a game so they could pay their bills. Of course they did the logical thing, which was to build a soccer game that you play with cars, and it worked.
“There [is] an astonishing set of titles being built from the best and brightest in the industry. They are getting together and building larger teams and making bigger and better things than we could have ever expected in previous years.”
Kim Libreri, Epic Games chief technology officer, says that the bigger impact of the move to an engine that earns money through royalties is twofold: Developers have one less thing to pay for when they’re getting started, and those game-making dreamers in established studios see the successes and the low points of entry and decide it’s time to go out and do their own things.
“[Unreal Engine 4] is so easily accessible now that people that work at AAA studios and have a bunch of mates that they think are awesome can basically quit their jobs and, in a small amount of time, build something awesome and I think it gives them that belief,” he says. “They look at Rocket League and they look at Ark and think, ‘Wow, that could be us, too.’ Really kickass developers are like, ‘Screw it, I’ve always wanted to have my own games company’ and they get together and they make something amazing really quickly.
“It eliminates the sort of conservatism that forces people to paint within the lines in a more contained environment.”
The timing seems fortuitous for a move to a royalty-only engine, but Sweeney says the company has been talking about doing this for nearly a decade. It took them until 2015 to finally roll out the idea because there was so much proprietary licensed code in the engine that they couldn’t give it away.
So instead, the indie revolution sparked with the help of a nurturing Unity Engine. Originally launched in 2005, Unity quickly became beloved by the indie game development scene because of its cross-platform support and low cost of entry. It wasn’t until now that Epic’s Unreal Engine seemed to be in the position to offer its own support to those up-and-coming game makers.
It’s clear that competition between Epic and Unity has helped everyone who uses either engine, both in the realm of available tools and cross-platform compatibility and in the cost of using those tools.
As entwined as the Unreal Engine is in everything that Epic does, it should come as no surprise that the studio sees it as one of the supporting columns of the company. It has evolved, even, past the role of safety net and now leads Epic’s move well beyond gaming into, essentially, everything.
During last month’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Epic hosted a panel about its engine and its uses outside gaming. The talk included NASA speaking about its use of the engine to create a sort of real-world holodeck, Walt Disney announcing plans to use the engine to create a Star Wars-themed experience for its theme parks and high-end British car manufacturer McLaren Automotive showing off how vehicle design and even sales are helped by the engine.
And that doesn’t touch on the Unreal Engine’s growing importance in the production of both feature films and television shows, including live shows.
The future, from Epic’s perspective, is Unreal.
Sweeney likes to explain why the Unreal Engine is used beyond games by pointing out just how similar the needs are for game development, architecture, vehicle design, film creation and, yes, even holodecks.
“You know 95 percent of all these different applications’ needs are the same thing,” he says. “They all need photorealistic graphics, rendering, environments and then a great authoring tool and pipeline to link them all together.
“What’s left is a five percent difference. Like architects need the ability to import data from AutoCAD, while designers, like auto engineers, need tools to produce their extraordinary high level of detail in real time. So there’s a little bit of specialization but we’re approaching this as one business, and not ‘how would an automobile empire look at this?’ It’s not 20 different segments. No, no, no, no, there are no market segments here. It’s one engine, one technology, one editor, one code base.”
And while the game industry has always been Epic’s bread and butter, it is minuscule when compared to the rest of the industries that could use Epic’s tools. Sweeney points to Autodesk, a multinational software company with revenue of more than $2.5 billion in 2014. It makes software for architecture, engineering, entertainment, construction and manufacturing industries. And even for the game industry, Maya is an incredibly popular 3D animation software tool, but Sweeney points out, gaming only counts for 10 percent of the company’s business.
“There’s this giant set of people using 3D tech for real-world uses and that’s all moving to real-time technology,” he says. “The really exciting thing here would be the interplay between the games industry and these other industries.”
I stand under a weathered stone archway, antlike in its looming presence. Through the archway I see a stone effigy to a bulbous, grey robot, its Popeye arms held akimbo as if in mid-stride. I turn my head to the left and see a stone edifice crumbling under a bright, blue sky mottled with cotton-ball clouds.
Beneath me I see the massive slabs of stone that make up the entrance, cobbles so big they could be used to form the sides of a house.
It’s not that the setting is big. It’s that I’m tiny, about the size of an insect.
I click an invisible button and a pair of stubby batons appears floating in front of me. With a quick adjustment, I grow to the size of a human and then flick open a menu on the top of one of the controllers. Pointing the second controller at it, I scroll through a selection of weathered stone columns and then select one with a click.
Outside of the VR experience, but still inside virtual reality, I spend 30 minutes fussing with the location: using the controllers to Spider-Man my way around the scene, shrink, rotate, enlarge, add and delete objects. The world is taking shape around me as I build it.
Finally, running out of time with this build of Epic’s Unreal Engine VR editor, I slip the HTC Vive mask from my face and blink in the dull light of an overcast day which falls through the nearby office window.
Building virtual reality inside virtual reality is less like visiting the chimerical spaces of “Inception” and a bit more like being at the center of your own little universe, literally.
The experience, on the surface, feels much more like playing than it does working.
I point this out to Mike Fricker, the technical director on the Unreal Engine team, and he agrees.
“We set out to build fun and intuitive VR world-building tools,” Fricker says. “That’s an unintended benefit.”
The decision to design a way for people making VR games to stay in VR while making them was born as a way to help the Bullet Train team on its work in that VR shooter, Fricker says.
But the concept and the desire for the VR in the VR editor has been floating around inside Epic ever since the first VR headset made an appearance at the company. That traces the original process of moving the engine into VR back about two years.
“Mark Rein was always on my ass,” Fricker says. “‘Dude, you gotta get that into VR!’ He was like asking for it maybe three or four years ago, but it was two years ago that we started doing some prototypes where we realized that the engine can handle it.”
Epic designed the Unreal Engine to be a desktop application, not to function in a 3D world, so that was an open question. Once they knew it could be done, the team kicked off work on the real thing in early 2015.
A lot of the work was easier than the team expected it to be, but it still had to solve problems unusual for an editor. Like, how do you move around inside what you’re building? They landed on something that feels a bit like Spider-Man but has you grabbing the world and pulling it past you.
While the tool to drop into VR to create VR wasn’t released to the public until Epic’s GDC keynote last month, the team working on Epic’s flagship virtual reality demo has been building with the tool as long as it’s been around.
Bullet Train started out as an exploration of virtual reality. Tommy Jacob, lead producer on the game, says Epic knew it wanted to do something in VR and that it wanted to do a shooter both because of the genre’s popularity and Epic’s experience.
The game started as a city street with a table resting in the middle of the road. The table is loaded up with guns, and players can pick any of them up and shoot them.
“The focus from the very start was to make holding a gun in your hand feel extremely visceral, extremely comfortable and to build on that mechanic,” Jacob says. “We thought about how we could make shooting a gun more fun, more exciting for the player. That’s when we started experimenting with the notion of bullet time and slow motion, catching bullets and throwing them back and things like that.”
But a VR shooting gallery isn’t where Bullet Train ended up. Instead it became a slick sci-fi shooter inside a train station. One that allows you to teleport around the station, grabbing guns, punching bad guys and shooting lots of guns. You can also slow time to grab bullets, snatch rockets out of the air or even deliver Oldboy-like melee combos that leave a pile of enemies in your wake.
Epic’s shift to 4.0 also has a lot to do with Bullet Train‘s existence.
“Around that time we realized we needed a VR team to make a first-class thing at Epic,” Jacob says. “We just went all in on it, like this was something that we knew that this could really take off, and we still feel that way. It could really happen this year.”
What’s strange is that Bullet Train remains a demo only with no plans to turn it into a title. It was useful in helping the engine team work out the kinks of developing a game in VR, but that seems to be the end of its usefulness.
Even that day, sitting across from me in a meeting room, Jacob says that they continue to polish the game, improve on it. But Epic has no plans for it beyond a demo.
That would sound unbelievable if it weren’t for the fact that this is actually Epic’s third VR demo. The others, which include being the titular hobbit in a scene with Smaug, the dragon from “The Hobbit,” aren’t just demos. They’re rarely, if ever, shown anymore. They were, in essence, a way to test some ideas and then packed away once they served their purpose.
While Epic doesn’t have a VR game to announce or release, that doesn’t mean the company doesn’t value what VR could mean for the game industry. Jacob says there are two sides to how virtual reality fits into what Epic is doing.
“There’s the engine side where we feel very passionate about ensuring people that are using our engine have access to the best tools to work in VR,” he says. “That’s a no-brainer. The other side is game development, with what we’ve seen in VR in the past year, particularly internally, because we’re all very excited about what we’ve been able to achieve in Bullet Train.
“I think there’s an obvious argument for the game side of Epic to embrace the VR and build something. What that is, I don’t know. It’s going to depend on what we think is important for Epic games moving forward. I don’t think Epic has a game future that doesn’t include VR.”
Throughout interviews with the people playing in and building in virtual reality, there always comes a time when they say to ask Sweeney what he thinks.
Unreal Engine VR editor as a Minecraft-like game? Ask Tim.
Bullet Train as a game? Ask Tim.
The future of VR inside Epic? Ask Tim.
Finally, I did.
“I think Minecraft is going to be the ultimate direction of VR, creating experiences that you can not only play as a participant but also contribute to,” Sweeney says. “That’s exactly what our goals would be and our engine is all about. Right now it’s being manifested through building our VR games, but the next step is to go much wider with this sort of thing. Not only building content but code and live objects that have accurate behavior in the world. That’s all going to play out with VR in the next decade.”
And, Sweeney says, eventually Epic will likely build a VR game. Just look at its iterative process, he says. The team has been building bigger, better, more interactive demos. Each time those demos feel more like a game and less like an experience.
“VR is a platform that is being nurtured right now,” he says, “that we expect will be central to the entire game industry, and we’ll contribute to it. So it’s fundamental to our future, and we’re putting an enormous effort into figuring it out as best as we can in our engine.”
Part of that process includes constantly iterating on the VR editing tool, something that is meant to increasingly democratize the game-making process.
“Right now the Unreal editor is still a true tool for professional content designers, but that’s going to open up really quickly,” Sweeney says. “Minecraft has this funny attribute to it — the set of building blocks are so limited, an absolute expert creator’s work isn’t dramatically better than casual users’ work. That’s not the case with Photoshop or 3D Studio, or the Unreal Engine. With these tools, if you have an expert come in, their work is orders of magnitude better than an amateur. So a huge initiative for us is to lower the gap in expertise that’s required.”
That means creating smart objects, defining and building templates for things like a castle or a farmhouse, and setting up rules for those things.
“Then you, as casual content creator, you should be able to go and stretch the walls out and say there should be a turret here and a rampart there, and design the castle without having to model it polygon by polygon or draw the individual pixels of it.
“With that kind of approach, you have a great deal of specialization where pros can create object libraries that are modifiable and extensible and parametric, and then individuals can use them to build excellent real-world objects.”
Sweeney envisions a world where someone could make that castle template and someone else could pay the designer real money to use it in their own little slice of the “metaverse.”
“Then maybe you’d go and buy some furniture or build your own,” he says. “We’re not talking about Epic running this business but about everybody in the world being able to collaborate to build things. Free experiences, commercial experiences, whatever, all the way from the Minecraft use case today to the professional game developers building professional games.”
Virtual reality is a big deal to Sweeney and to Epic, both because of the potential uses it drives with the engine and the potential games that can be created.
“I think it’s a stepping stone to the future of the industry,” Sweeney says. “I believe we’re in this long-term transition to augmented reality, that in 10 years we won’t be sitting in front of monitors or smartphones or using keyboards or mice at all, but we’ll be wearing something literally with the convenience and form factor of your Oakley sunglasses and that will have 8K displays per eye and it will be your window into both the real world and virtual world.
“That way everything from gaming to computing to professional work is all going to be completely rethought. VR is the stepping stone to that. Right now we’re putting on this really big helmet and there’s a bunch of really big cables that run to a computer. That’s the starting point but, as with the smartphone evolution, the end point is pervasive technology that’s in the hands of billions of people.”
Lights, camera, graphics: How Epic helps Hollywood
Agent Smith stands silent sentinel over one office in Epic’s packed-to-the-gills Cary, North Carolina headquarters.
While many of the rooms that house cubicles and desks also include a heady potpourri of science fiction and fantasy swords, figures, masks and collectibles, Agent Smith stands out. Even compared to the one-story slide that ends at the feet of a nearly two-story Unreal Tournament Malcolm statue, the stone-faced Smith stands out.
He is one of many Smiths created for use in one of the concluding scenes for “The Matrix” trilogy, a scene that required a city filled with the antagonist. After his big screen moment, he eventually landed here, quietly watching over the work of the man who helped to give his character so many spectacular moves.
Kim Libreri, chief technology officer at Epic, has a long history of working on visual special effects, which includes time on “The Matrix,” basically making that movie what it was through a mix of practical and computer-generated artistry.
Libreri says the team working on “The Matrix” movies “broke every computer graphics standard in the film industry.”
After “The Matrix,” he went on to work at Industrial Light and Magic and that led to his move to Lucasfilm where he was the senior vice president of technology working on, among other things, the mothballed Star Wars 1313 game.
For about two years, Libreri worked alongside Paul Meegan, Epic’s current president, who was the president of LucasArts at the time.
“We were making an effort to bring back to LucasArts the core of what everyone loved about ‘Star Wars,’ like ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ and make really authentic games,” Meegan says. “We’d gone through the process of building 1313 and it was about at that point in time, of course, that the Disney acquisition happened.”
Through a mutual friend, Meegan met with Tim Sweeney to discuss moving over to Epic.
“Tim explained the vision he had for Epic going forward, really transitioning the company from a retail game developer to a company that brings its game directly to the players, and that was something I was really interested in doing,” Meegan says.
After that meeting, Meegan came aboard and he found that there were a lot of similarities between working at Epic, where the games and the engine that drives them are made under the same roof, and working at LucasArts where the movies and games and the special effects of ILM are in the same building.
While Libreri spent more time in movies than in games, consulting even recently on movies like “Jupiter Ascending” and “Super 8,” his move to LucasArts and ILM was empowered by what he saw as a possible future where computer graphics might one day cross the uncanny valley.
He saw what Meegan was doing at Epic and saw the potential of Epic’s games and its engine, and he decided that things were about to change in entertainment and he needed to move to Epic to help that happen.
“I loved working at LucasArts. I have a lot of friends there, but I could see that the whole world was about to change,” he says. “VR was about to happen. Real-time graphics was getting to a point where … you could put images made in a game engine up on the big screen and it would basically hold up.”
When Meegan approached Libreri, he took the job because he saw the worlds of film and gaming colliding.
“Epic is going to be very important for many people across all media in the future,” he says. “It’s not as if we’re like saying, ‘let’s get away from what makes Epic at its core — a games engine for games.’ It’s more about, as entertainment and games change and we become more at the center of that, being at the place that is responsible for evolving entertainment in general.”
While Epic worked to help empower a different sort of creator — the people behind movies and television — they also worked to improve the way video games tell stories. That biggest shift was announced during GDC in March when Epic unveiled its new cinematic tool: Sequencer.
Sequencer allows you to move cut scene snippets around on a timeline, swap out lenses, tweak the lighting and set focus in a way that Libreri says amplifies the audience’s perception of the scene.
“The long and short of it is it’s a tool that’s much more familiar to anybody that’s done traditional editing,” he says. “A lot of the capabilities you’d expect if you were making an animated feature or live action movie, cutting your own amateur movie with footage you’d shot on video is way, way more familiar in Sequencer. We have lenses that now behave like real camera lenses with proper focal lengths. Proper film formats.”
These are all good tools for game makers, but they also happen to be good tools for movie and TV show creators.
“We’re talking with a lot of visual effects companies, previs companies who do feature film stuff,” says Michael Gay, Epic’s director of cinematic production. “Episodic TV as well, so we definitely wanted to create a tool that caters to content creators, whether that’s games or feature film previews or episodic TV.”
Already Epic is seeing some results to those conversations with TV and movie makers. There are a slew of indie movies made with the engine and Gay believes the engine is quickly approaching the point where it can provide photo-realistic feature film quality effects in real time.
“Well, at least feature film animation out of the engine in real time,” he says. “So you apply that to something like Sequencer where you can quickly iterate through this stuff and you see how quickly you can turn this stuff around.”
Kim Libreri says that there are three or four animated television shows that Epic knows of that are likely to go into production this year.
“They’ve been waiting for Sequencer to make it a bit easier,” he says. “There’s an animated movie that we heard about too. It’s not a Pixar-level thing, but we’ll see.
“I think we’re going to start seeing our engine used in live television broadcasts. Wherever you see green screens or in sports matches where they want to overlay crazy creatures, like you know, have a dinosaur from ‘Jurassic Park’ run across a football stadium. You’re going to be seeing our engine used for that sort of stuff.”
During this year’s Game Developers Conference, Epic showed off a fascinating use of the technology: a live performance capture that had an actress up on stage performing her role as the Unreal Engine interpreted it and rendered it in real time. It was like watching a digital version of a high fidelity puppet show.
“For film production,” Libreri says, “I think that using the engine for live action as a final, you know we’re going to make a spaceship on a star field, the technology is getting quite close where you’re going to be able to do that and it looks realistic enough. But I don’t think we’ll see final shots going through our engine for, I don’t know, two or five years from now.”
Already, film sets are using the engine to visualize creatures, objects and environments that don’t actually exist on the site.
In those cases, the director will have a screen that shows the actor and the Unreal Engine-powered rendering of whatever will be added in postproduction. The director can then use that to tweak the actor’s performance. In some cases, Libreri says, when an actor has to look into the eyes of a figment, the Unreal creation might be projected onto the set in the right place and then removed in postproduction.
AR/VR real-time camera tracking company Ncam uses the Unreal Engine for its jobs, which include work on movies like “Independence Day 2” and “Knights of the Round Table: King Arthur.”
The use of CGI in more movies and television could also lead to new sorts of entertainment.
“There’s no reason why, in the next couple of years, an animated movie can’t be something that is rendered on demand and generated on your cellphone with your specific preferences, like the princess dress that you bought for your kid is the one she gets to see in the movie,” Libreri says. “Her house can be in the background. People will start to see the power of real-time graphics and we’ll start to see experiences, more personable, more editable.”
There is a vast undiscovered country between what people call movies and what they call games, Sweeney says.
“Right now what you output is a video file or it’s a game,” he said, “but everything in between is yet to be explored.”
A single shareware game created by Tim Sweeney launched Potomac Computer Systems in 1991. Back then the company consisted of Sweeney’s parents’ home and Sweeney. It quickly grew to encompass co-founder Mark Rein who brought more business sense and a desire to grow to the company. Soon after came 17-year-old game designer Cliff Bleszinski.
One man’s shareware mail-order business had become a game studio.
As a developer, the company didn’t just survive; it thrived. Under the hands of Rein and Sweeney, the company built a financial safety net out of a game engine licensing business. It saw four eras, four iterations of the company stretched out across 25 years of making games, building engines and entertaining the masses.
Today, Epic Games is a fixture in the town of Cary, North Carolina.
Cab drivers can tell you its history and know all about the regular trips developers and would-be employees make to the white concrete and blue glass headquarters wedged under an arc of chain hotels, movie theaters and apartment complexes. Area restaurants know, when you sit at a back table in the quiet corner discussing kills, graphics and virtual reality, that you’ve come from Epic to have a bite to eat. The company even has a driver, a man, other cabbies tell me in almost hushed voices, whose work entails ferrying job candidates back and forth between the office and the airport.
And even at its current size, Epic is bursting at the seams.
Sweeney’s desk is crammed into a back corner, no bigger than any other in an office that once seemed designed to hold just him. Now he shares the space with marketing and PR folk, all stacked side by side. Desks are set up in rooms once meant for meetings. The company’s major capture studio, which takes up a corner of the building, has been converted to a massive testing room loaded with PCs and games for the occasional large-scale alpha testing.
The halls of the company are always bustling.
Once during our visit, while walking toward a lunch room, it looked like class had let out: People were streaming out of different rooms, all headed in a hurry to new locations.
Epic’s headquarters is growing. The company is breaking ground soon on a neighboring lot to build new offices to help house the now 250 or so employees that work there. Up from 10 when Epic first moved to Cary.
“There has been immense growth over the last few years at Epic,” Bleszinski says. “It’s a tricky thing to do. You’ve got to give Tim and crew props over there.
“They’ve been in business for more than 25 years. That’s not an easy thing to do, especially in this industry.”
Sweeney knows the balance he’s constantly walking with the company, but he says, now three years or so into Epic 4.0, he remains committed to the plan.
“I’m more excited now about the future of Epic than I have ever been before,” he says. “That might seem unusual for a 25-year-old company, but we see more opportunities for the company now than ever before.”
Ever looking forward, Sweeney seems energized. The future of Epic, of the game industry, his future, all seem to be pointing toward a game he’s always wanted to make, one he described in a Kotaku article back in 2011 that allowed users to teleport through worlds of player and developer creations seamlessly.
That game would be the game if it ever happened, something that was everything combined in a single sort of interface.
“I find this idea of the metaverse very compelling, but frankly we don’t know what it is,” he says. “If you read ‘Snow Crash,’ it’s this awesome computer medium that you get in and out of coordinating with each other using phone booths in the real world. All of this fiction was written before social network was invented. Before the internet had high bandwidth. Before computers were capable of anything like they are today.”
Epic 4.0 seems like the sort of company that could be home to that sort of game. And this era of Epic, this form of the company may actually be its last.
“We went from PC shareware to PC retail, and then piracy crushed all single-player PC game sales before multiplayer had become too big in those days, so we moved to console drives there for about a decade then moved back to direct relationships with customers,” Sweeney says. “It’s funny — if you look at Valve, they just took that one path through their entire life in this industry. So there are alternative histories that come back to the same point, but it’s certainly the right place to be now.”
There was a time, back when Bleszinski still worked at Epic, that he and Sweeney would take to the streets of the nearby Raleigh suburbs to mull over ideas and talk.
“We would go for a walk when the weather was good,” Bleszinski says. “We’d walk for maybe 45 minutes and talk about where the studio was going and where I wanted to go and where he wanted to go.”
Sweeney says he still does those walks when he’s picking over an idea or noodling out a solution to something.
“It’s so much better to be outside in the open, walking around the block, free of any office,” he says. “Everyone used to think it was really weird until the Steve Jobs biopic came out. Now I’m validated.”
When I ask Sweeney if he misses those walks with Bleszinski, there’s a long pause.
I can see him working over his answer.
He breaks the silence almost wistfully.
“Now I have a lot more people I can walk with.”
This story originally ran on Polygon on May 2, 2016.
