Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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They'd be connected by going north past the end of the current board would take you to a new one if it was open, or maybe it was blocked and you couldn't go there. I built this whole game world around that, and this was the game that became ZZT. And I was having fun with it, building it and playing it, but I didn't know if it would really work. So I did this experiment.
I started inviting neighbors over, like some adults, some kids of all different ages, and sat them down from it and said, like, here's a game I made. Figure it out. And, you know, I had to force myself not to tell them what they need to do, right? Because I really wanted to learn if they were able to. you know, discover it all for themselves.
You know, today we would call this, you know, user experience test. And there's a whole field of research around user experience research. But back then it was just inviting some kids over to play the game. I took notes about what they got stuck on and what they enjoyed and where they felt bored and just iteratively polished the game until I felt it was good.
And I put it out and released it on, well, this was before the internet. So there were bulletin boards. I uploaded it to a bunch of local bulletin boards. And from there it started spreading because, you know, the way to build up cred for bulletin board users was to upload new files and to claim that, Hey, I was the first that brought this to you.
And, uh, you know, so there was a natural tendency of the software to spread. I decided to use the shareholder model, you know, so I didn't just build this one game. I built a trilogy of three games. Um, I released the first one for free and I said, Hey, if you'd like this, buy the two sequels. Um, and I, I included my parents mailing address and, uh,
He said, you know, send us $30 and you can get the sequel to this game. And the check started coming in within a few days. I was making like, getting three or four orders a day. I was making like $100 a day. I'm like, woo, I'm rich. Because, you know, being a 20-year-old, that was like a pretty big deal.
I looked at money always just as a tool to help you fund accomplishing cool things. And having enough to do the things you want to do is the critical thing. It's always been just very utilitarian. But the knowledge that other people all around the country and then a month later all around the world were playing the game, that was mind-boggling.
That me, like this little kid who'd put out a game on a local bulletin board, could be doing international business and chipping discs all over the world to players because the software was spreading on its own. It was just magical. And that was a new thing for software. That did not happen with mechanical devices. You manufactured one, you sold it to somebody, and they had it, and that was it.
But software could spread. That was just really cool to see, and it made me realize there's really no upward limit on the potential for a business like that. We saw Microsoft as the big juggernaut company at the time, but it was like, hey, if Epic does games good enough, we could accomplish what they've accomplished with operating systems. And the sky was the limit.
And I think this is the age we live in now. You don't have to be an industrialist manufacturing physical products. Anybody who builds anything digitally, if it's good enough, you can reach the entire world and build anything. Next Microsoft or Meta or Apple or Google or Epic Games.
Yeah, and a bunch of learnings emerged really quickly there. The neat thing I did with CZT was I didn't just release the game. I also released the editor with it. I built this tool so I could make these CZT boards that people could play, but I also gave it to all of the players themselves. And 30 years later, I still run into people. When I go to a game industry event, it was like,
I grew up playing ZZT, and here's an adult who grew up playing my game. It was because it enabled anybody to become a creator, too. It had this little board editor, and it also had a little scripting language, so you could learn a little bit of programming in it, too.
It really set a formative principle of Epic, which was that the company's mission is to make awesome entertainment, but also awesome tools, and to share those tools with everybody so that they can build their own amazing things, too.
And when we got into Unreal Engine a few years later, the interplay between us building a game and us building tools that were widely used by others was a critical part of that. And I think that's the sole reason that Epic has been massively successful.
And actually, the reason that we've survived all of this time is that by serving both creators and gamers, we've been able to weather the ups and downs of the game industry. It's a brutal place for companies. And we've been able to survive every financial downturn. And sometimes the engine's been funding the business because we didn't have a game.
And sometimes the games have been funding the business. And it really set a principle in our culture that's persevered and is continually brought to the forefront.
Yeah, and it's something we aim to do more and more fully over time. In the course of building Fortnite, we've built a lot of other tools that are useful for us too. It's not just a game powered by Unreal Engine, but it's also a social ecosystem where people can make friends and voice chat and get together and party. So we've opened up all of those social features into epic online services.
And we give them away to all developers for free because we all benefit from growth in that user base. Our goal is ultimately to build the company's products on the same technology that we share with everybody else and to help that foster a bigger and bigger ecosystem over time where everybody benefits.
So the internet is a funny thing. It started out as this defense department research project called the ARPANET, the Advanced Research Project Agency Network. And it was kind of like this revered secret thing that became more and more open as they connected universities. Universities connected to the internet in the mid-1980s. And so if you were...
at a prestigious institution with access to computers, you could get on there. But the consumer back then, we just had these modems. This thing you plug into your phone line, and it dials up a phone number and then sends wild sound effects over the telephone line to send digital signals back and forth. And these were really slow. The first modem I had was 300 watts.
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