Behind the Unreal engine of gaming phenom Fortnite
Epic Games began like most Silicon Valley companies — in a garage by someone who had a dream and the skills to make it happen. Fast forward three decades later and it is the multi-billion dollar company behind Fortnite, a gaming phenomenon that has taken
Nearly 30 years ago, a young Tim Sweeney founded Potomac Computer Systems. The headquarters? His parents’ garage in the US state of Maryland. Having always been fascinated by computers, Sweeney released the company’s first game in 1991. He then changed the company’s name to Epic MegaGames Inc. before finally settling it to Epic Games in 1999. The latter was successful as a games development company but the arrival of their 1998 first-person shooter game, Unreal, heralded the start of something special: Their Unreal Engine — a game engine or game ‘infrastructure’ — which is a software-development environment designed for people to build video games.
Over the next two decades, Unreal Engine would go on to power ground breaking titles with graphics capabilities never before seen, from the wildly successful blockbuster games like Gears of War (2006 onwards), Bioshock (2007), Borderlands 3 (2019) and the Final Fantasy VII remake (2020) to indie games like Little Nightmares ( 2017). The free- touse, open source nature of Unreal made it palatable and accessible to anyone and since 2015, Epic Games has even made the engine available on GitHub, a software development platform host.
In a fine example of being one of the “good guys” in tech, Epic Games also allowed for Unreal’s use in commercial products based on a royalty model, typically asking developers for 5% of revenues from sales. Recently, they even waived this fee for developers that publish their games through the Epic Games Store, and for revenues up through the first US$1 million ($1.39 million). The Unreal Engine is now widely recognised as the world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool, recreating ever more lifelike scenes, imagery and characters on screen.
Epic Games saw further success when it released Fortnite Battle Royale in 2017, a free-to-play “battle royale” (a style of game where a certain number of players face off against each other to be the “last man standing”) online video game. Powered by the Unreal Engine, the game was praised for its gameplay, style and learning curve. Today, the game is immensely popular — one of the most successful games of all time, in fact — boasting more than 350 million players as of May, generating well over two billion dollars worldwide. More than just a game, however, Fortnite has become a social and cultural phenomenon — some may say it even formed a unique microcosm of its own. However, Epic Games is now looking far beyond the gaming industry. In fact, it is looking towards a future where their game engine will power other industries and revolutionise the gaming industry.
Future engine
It seems that the future could lie in Southeast Asia where Quentin Staes-Polet, the general manager of Epic Games and head of the company’s Southeast Asia expansion, is based. He joined the company in 2019 and splits his time between India and Singapore. As part of the company’s expansion strategy