FUTURE PROOF

Inside Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, a game engine that’s ahead of its time

- JEN SIMPKINS

Epic has always been in the business of seeing the future. Nowadays, however, the situation is a little more complicated than that. “It’s kind of a scam,” smiles CEO and founder Tim Sweeney, “because while we’re predicting the future, we’re actually secretly building it in the background so that our predictions are right.” It’s a comment that succinctly describes just how influential a force in the videogame industry Epic has become, especially over the last few years. Epic has always been a big player, particularly in terms of tech: the cover of E251 featured Unreal Engine 4, whose graphical capabilities and accessible tools – not to mention its competitive pricing scheme – quickly made it one of the cornerstones of the creation of a new generation of games. Now, its maker has positioned itself at the forefront of the next one.

Still, back in 2012, Epic was really going through it. In the very same year Unreal Engine 4 was announced, the company revealed that it was to be part-acquired by Chinese multinational conglomerate Tencent. Epic had revealed a trailer for a small side-project called Fortnite the previous year, and the team was starting to realise that the planned series of updates to evolve the game might be best suited to a free-to-play model – and that it was this model that was the future of success in the videogame industry. If anyone knew how to make that kind of thing work, it was Tencent, the world’s number one operator of live games.