Video Game Syndrome

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Screen Grab from Unreal Engine 4 Demo Reel

Courtesy: Epic Games

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When Tim Sweeney is out in the world discussing pedestrian things—the sweet tea at a particular barbecue restaurant, say, or the irony of having a hockey team in North Carolina, a place without much naturally occurring ice—part of him seems to be missing. It’s as if some roped-off area of his parietal lobe is back in the office, mulling over whatever conundrum is plaguing his graphics guys: how best to digitally re-create the diffusion of light through skin maybe, or how to show the world reflected in a character’s eye.

Tall and thin, with hair slightly unkempt and glasses thick enough to focus sunlight into a lethal, ant-killing beam, Sweeney often sounds short of breath while talking, which makes his already wispy voice seem as though it might fade out entirely at any second. Only when small talk turns technical does the founder of Epic Games seem to come truly alive. His eyes light up, his voice grows stronger, and he begins measuring the world in orders of magnitude and processing speed. Sweeney is living in the future, and he wants us all to see it.

He’s brought us there before. At the heart of every videogame—underneath the art direction, the writing, and the action—is an elaborate piece of software called the game engine. It’s an essential collection of programs and algorithms, a periodic table of the elements that allows a game’s programmers and designers to create the rich and varied worlds gamers have come to expect. Lighting, physics, artificial intelligence: These are all the purview of the game engine. And once a game studio puts all those elements together, the engine is also responsible for running them as the game is played, controlling a never-ending cascade of complex interactions, scenarios, and outcomes on the fly.

While some developers make their own game engines, the vast majority rely on other companies’ creations. And hundreds of them use Epic’s Unreal Engine, which Sweeney and his team first brought into the world in 1998. Through three distinct incarnations (think of Mac’s growth from OS 8 to OS X), the Unreal Engine has become the default substrate of the gaming industry. The most recent, Unreal 3, has powered more than 150 games since 2006, from sleeper hits like Borderlands to top-line blockbusters like the Mass Effect trilogy to Epic’s own juggernaut, the Gears of War franchise. If you’ve fired up a console game in recent memory, chances are you’ve seen the scythe-tipped lower-case u that is Unreal’s logo.

But six years is a long time in binary code, and it represents a lifetime for gaming hardware. Indeed, since consoles became the primary way to play videogames at home in the 1980s, the industry has rolled out a new generation of consoles roughly every five years. It was the only way to keep pace with the exponential improvements in chip speed and processing power. But as the seventh-generation consoles—today’s PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360—approach their sixth and seventh years on the market, respectively, the current hardware has grown rickety with age and is now easily outclassed by high-powered PCs. The Xenos graphics processor in the Xbox 360 can handle roughly 240 billion floating point operations per second; the latest high-end processors for PCs can handle around 3 trillion. Not surprisingly, speculation has been ramping up for several years about the next wave of game consoles. We may hear word of them this year, or next, or not until 2014. Whoever knows isn’t telling. But what we do know is that the wizards at Epic have been hard at work on the engine that will power this new generation of consoles. It’s called Unreal Engine 4, and it’s ready now.

UE4 represents nothing less than the foundation for the next decade of gaming. It may make Microsoft and Sony rethink how much horsepower they’ll need for their new hardware. It will streamline game development, allowing studios to do in 12 months what can take two years or more today. And most important, it will make the videogames that have defined the past decade look like puppet shows.

Will that be enough? Today’s videogame industry generates about billion a year in revenue, and the vast majority of that comes from premium titles that can cost upwards of 0 million to produce (and have the potential to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars on release day alone). But paradigms are shifting: Cheaply developed mobile titles and an unforgiving economy have cast doubt on the future of the blockbuster game. Why go big and risky when you can be safe and profitable? Unreal 4 is Epic’s answer to that question. With it, the company is staking its existence on a bold prediction: that the future of the industry depends on ever-more realistic visual spectacle.

For all their profits, many videogame companies have never bothered to upgrade their offices to the bucolic campuses and Infinite Loops of the personal-computing world. Epic’s headquarters, outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, are housed in a squat concrete building off a winding drive in an industrial park. Still, there are plenty of perks inside—a gym, a quiet room for stressed developers, and an amply stocked kitchen. There’s also a massive motion-capture studio for translating live action into animation and a traditional art studio where game artists can keep their nondigital skills limber. For the requisite rejuvenile whimsy, there’s a tubular slide that takes people down from the second floor to the common lounge. (When it was first installed, it shot people out so quickly that Epic had to adjust the angle for safety—there’s no tweaking our planet’s physics engine.)

It’s late February, a week before the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where Epic will be unveiling UE4 for the first time outside of the office. Reps from Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia, and the most influential game developers in the industry will be seeing the demo behind closed doors; the NDA-only affair will be Epic’s first and best chance to convince them that the future of gaming is unlike anything they previously imagined. “There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of our engine team and our studio to drag this industry into the next generation,” says Cliff Bleszinski, Epic’s design director. “It is up to Epic, and Tim Sweeney in particular, to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be. It needs to be a quantum leap. They need to damn near render Avatar in real time, because I want it and gamers want it—even if they don’t know they want it.”

While “damn near render Avatar in real time” likely isn’t up on a whiteboard in the office, it’s the kind of rapid-fire hyperbole that has made Bleszinski the face of Epic to many gamers. For his part, though, Sweeney is a bit more diplomatic. “We’re much more in sync with the console makers than any other developer is,” he says. “That means we can give detailed recommendations with a complete understanding of what is going to be commercially possible.” In other words, Epic has seen the specs of proposed new consoles and is actively lobbying for them to be more powerful. It could be a bad sign for the industry if new, relatively underpowered consoles make an appearance at this year’s E3 consumer show (as is popularly rumored about Sony’s PS3 successor, the alleged specs of which leaked in April).

Wired: Game|Life