Epic Games
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| Epic Games | |
 |
|
| Type | Privately held |
|---|---|
| Founded | Rockville, Maryland (1991) |
| Headquarters | Cary, North Carolina |
| Key people | Tim Sweeney, Founder/CEO Mark Rein, Founder/Vice-President Mike Capps, President Jay Wilbur, Vice President Cliff Bleszinski, Lead Designer |
| Industry | Computer and video games |
| Products | Games Overkill ZZT Jill of the Jungle Super ZZT Solar winds 1&2 Zone 66 Dare to Dream Ken's Labyrinth Xargon Jazz Jackrabbit Brix Epic Pinball Radix: Beyond the Void Tyrian One Must Fall Fire Fight Unreal Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Unreal Tournament Unreal Tournament 2003 Unreal Tournament 2004 Unreal Tournament III Unreal 2 Gears of War Game Engines Unreal Engine 1 Unreal Engine 2 Unreal Engine 3 |
| Employees | 83[citation needed] |
| Website | www.epicgames.com |
Epic Games, also known as Epic and formerly as Epic MegaGames, is a computer game development company based in Cary, North Carolina, United States.
[edit] History
Epic Games was initially founded under the name Potomac Computer Systems in 1991 by Tim Sweeney in Rockville, Maryland. Potomac Computer Systems released its flagship product, ZZT, the same year. During the latter portion of ZZT's life span, the company became known as Epic MegaGames. Gradually, the Epic brand grew with the advent of its shareware games, including Epic Pinball, Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall: 2097. During this time, Epic also published and sold games developed by other developers such as those by Safari Software and also XLand's Robbo, Heartlight, and Electro Man; and Renaissance's Zone 66. In 1997 Safari Software was acquired in whole by Epic and some of their titles as well as other pre-1998 games are sold under the Epic Classics brand.
In 1998, Epic MegaGames released Unreal, a 3D first-person shooter, which expanded into a series of Unreal games. The company also began to license the core technology, or Unreal engine, used for the series to other game developers. In 1999, the company changed its name to Epic Games and moved its offices, including its Rockville headquarters, to Cary. Subsequently came the Unreal Tournament series. At present, the company has just released the Xbox 360 title Gears of War and is currently working on Unreal Tournament III for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Developers at Epic Games include the aforementioned Lead Programmer Tim Sweeney and game designer Cliff Bleszinski. In 2003, Jerry O'Flaherty was named Studio Art Director.
[edit] Game Engines
Epic is the proprietor of three successful game engines in the videogame industry.[citation needed] Each Unreal Engine, as they are called, has a complete feature set of graphical rendering, sound processing, and physics that can be widely adapted to fit the specific needs of a game developer that does not want to code its own engine from scratch. The three engines Epic has created are the Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 2 and its 2.5 point release adding support for ingame vehicles and improved netcode, and Unreal Engine 3, a next-generation game engine featuring per-pixel shaders, lifelike physics that support acceleration with the PhysX card, and a plethora of improved developer tools to accelerate the development process.
Epic has also revealed in interviews that an Unreal Engine 4 is in the works [1].
