Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…So I’m sure people know, but Epic Games was created in 1991 and went on to transform the gaming industry several times, one of which is Unreal Engine. So let’s talk through the origin story of that. You said that when Wolfenstein and Doom came out, that changed everything, so take me to that moment. Yeah, that was a very interesting time. Epic had, after my first couple of games that had recruited developers, usually college students, high school students who were just working on their own, had real skills but didn’t have an outlet for their work, Epic had been matchmaking the best artists and programmers together from all over the world. Like Chaz Jackrabbit was Cliff Bleszinski, a high school kid in California, had made a really cool adventure game together with Arjan Brussee, a demo coder from Holland, who would make amazing graphical stuff and had built a 2D game engine. They had connected them together, and a musician, Robert Allen in California. And by telephone and modem and so on we were building these little 2D games and having quite a lot of success. There were a bunch of people making thousands of dollars a month while they were still students in royalties from the games the Epic was producing and by coordinating with people and publishing through shareware. And that was all going great. The company had a little office and we were copying floppy disks and mailing them out. But when Wolfenstein came out, we realized the future of gaming is going to be 3D. There had been a lot of experiments in 3D before that hadn’t been great. There were 3D renderings of mazes that were not in real time, and you were always looking north, south, east or west, and then there were vector graphics with little wire frames moving around and things. But Wolfenstein was the first game that was fast enough, running at 30 frames per second, it really felt immersive. It felt like you were there. You were in this Castle Wolfenstein fighting Nazis. And that was a really amazing and immersive experience. 3D graphics were pretty primitive then and software followed shockingly fast with Doom, which was a much, much more capable 3D engine, which had stairs and though it was still what we call two and a half D, it was environments that were very realistic, textures that were very realistic, a form of lighting that was approximate, but incredibly realistic. And just such great artistry and sound effects that it feeled completely visceral and real. You might look at it today from our point of view of a modern game player with 20 teraflops of computing power in your device and say, “Oh, that’s not very impressive.” But it was amazing at the time. I mean for me, just sorry to pause on that, I think Wolfenstein was one of the most amazing moments of my own life. Just being able to, like you said, in real time move about a three-dimensional world. I just remember just moving around just in what is that feeling like? I mean, you feel transported into another world.…

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