Sure, the things that become obsolete, like the rendering code, will be thrown out and completely rewritten. ''Even at Epic, our next-generation engine, which we're starting on now, will use existing technology. ''As technology marches on, it gets harder and harder and more and more expensive to write an engine from scratch,'' Mr. The reason Unreal can license its engine in the first place is that few people can afford to write their own anymore, with the notable exception of Id Software, which developed Doom and Quake and licenses the Quake 3 Arena engine for a half-million dollars. In an industry where costs continue to spiral upward, reusable code is the holy grail.
But the company has also employed programmers to work full time on the engine. Of course, Epic has been painting on its own canvas as well - Unreal Tournament promises to be a hot seller for the holidays. Our engine is really just the paints, and anybody can go out and buy a set of paints. ''And there are some that you can't even recognize. ''There are games that look and feel a bit too much like Unreal,'' said Mark Rein, Epic's vice president and engine evangelist. The Unreal engine purrs beneath the dark and sophisticated Deus Ex, the forthcoming title from Ion Storm, as well as the candy-colored corridors of Nerf Arena Blast, published by Hasbro Interactive's Atari label. These projects run the gamut, from the swaggering Duke Nukem Forever to The Wheel of Time, a fantasy adventure based on Robert Jordan's novels, and TNN Outdoor Pro Hunter, which combines bucolic scenery with Doom-style game play.
It sold more than a million copies and made $10 million for Epic - not bad for a company with 13 employees. Unreal was the most gorgeous game anyone had ever seen. Unreal was a spectacular gamble for its developer, Epic Games, and a nail-biting investment for its publisher, GT Interactive, but it paid off.
It was the software equivalent of designing your own hammers, ladders, power saws and paintbrushes before you begin construction on a house. The programmers created the whole tool set from scratch. The game took three years and $3 million to make, and the vast majority of that time and expense went into the engine. In the case of Unreal, the hit first-person shooter of 1998, the game's engine - the underlying software - has become a cottage industry. But that is where the real technological advancements are made. Less attention is paid to what's under the hood. COMPUTER games, like cars, are praised for their exterior styling: the landscapes the lighting the number, size and relative intelligence of the monsters.