The History of UnrealScript

Paul Taylor 2009

ZZT

• Tim Sweeny started development on ZZT in 1990 and released in 1991

• It was originally a text editor• An ASCII based game

– Came with a level editor!!!

• ZZT has been released to the world. (It’s now free)

• It is about 20,000 lines of Pascal• And the source is lost!

http://www.textmodegames.com/download/zzt.html

Epic Mega Games

• 1 guy living at home with his parents!– The name was derived to match Apogee

Note: Apogee became 3D Realms!

Unreal

• Development started in 1994

• Inspired by the “little crappy editor with a very advanced game engine behind it” that Doom and Quake had. *Complexly separate programs

• Tim decided that content development was the core need. He decided that more effort should be spent on the editor and tools than the game itself.

The Editor-Centric approach

• The editor was integrated into the game engine, allowing for real-time display of everything.

• Looking back at ZZT Tim has noted that it just evolved and he never planned the outcome, as opposed to Unreal where ZZT was pretty much a road map to the development.

• Less than 25 people (at most) worked on Unreal

• In 1997 the team moved into a building together to increase their productivity

• In 1998 the team moved from Canada down to Raleigh (North Carolina)

Crunch Time

“We were betting everything on that(Unreal) -- including our credit card balances. Mark Rein got his American Express card taken away from funding Epic at that point. We bet everything on it, and it was a success. “

• Another 6 months and Tim believes that Epic would have folded.

Currently...

• Epic have an 18+ team that work on the engine alone!

• 89% Male 11% Female

• 110+ Employees

SOME games on the Unreal 3 Engine

• Mirror's Edge, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy, Huxley, BioShock, Mass Effect, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, Tom Clancy's EndWar, Lost Odyssey, Turok, Unreal Tournament 3, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, Army of Two, The Last Remnant, Gears of War and Gears of War 2.

The Future...?

• Crysis is the biggest competitor to Epic– High end PCs are 2% of the next-Gen market.– So Epic is not worried about Crysis

• But CryEngine 3 is cross-platform.....

• Engine Warz??

References

• http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4035/from_the_past_to_the_future_tim_.php

• http://www.linkedin.com/companies/epic-games

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Sweeney_(game_developer)