Tim Sweeney: evaluation

Transcript context

…That’s such a cool origin story though. You started out building a text editor, so you’re looking at this project, you’re playing around with it, you building up the tools. And that’s such an inspiring moment because a lot of us start out building a project and to allow yourself to see the potential pivots, the potential trajectories that can go is really nice. To sit back, allow yourself to be bored and like, ah, I’m going to go this way. I mean, that’s like a crossroads. You came to a crossroads. I mean, you built compilers, you design your own programming language, you built compilers, databases, all these things you’ve mentioned, and you started building a text editor and then here it came to this crossroad, I’m going to make this fun. And then from there, one of the most legendary gaming companies was created. It’s kind of cool. That’s an inspiring thing for sort of developers. Be open to the possibility of creating something you didn’t plan to create and just go with it. Right? That’s cool. Yeah, and it was a bunch of learnings emerged really quickly there. The neat thing I did with ZZT was I didn’t just release the game, I also released the editor with it. I’d built this tool so I could make these ZZT boards that people could play, but I also gave it to all of the players themselves. And 30 years later, I still run into people when I go to a game industry event, it was like I grew up playing ZZT and here’s an adult who grew up playing my game. And it was because it enabled anybody to become a creator too. It had this old board editor and it also had a little scripting language, so you could learn a little bit of programming in it too. And it kind of impressed, and it really set a formative principle of Epic, which was that the company’s mission is to make awesome entertainment, but also awesome tools and to share those tools with everybody so that they can build their own amazing things too. And when we got into Unreal Engine a few years later, the interplay between us building a game and us building a tool, tools that were widely used by others, was a critical part of that. And I think that’s the sole reason that Epic has been massively successful. And actually the reason that we’ve survived all of this time is by serving both creators and gamers. We’ve been able to weather the ups and downs of the game industry. It’s a brutal place for companies. We’ve been able to survive every financial downturn, and sometimes the engine’s been funding the business because we didn’t have a game. And sometimes the games have been funding the business. And it really set a principle in our culture that’s persevered and is continually bought to the forefront. But on the editor front, that’s such a fascinating philosophy that you always allow people to create their own worlds. You have an engine from which you simulate the world that the game is in. You have the actual game, and you also have the freedom for creators to create various, in Fortnite, islands of their own. With everything you ship, that freedom to create is always there. That’s really interesting.…

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