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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Appearances
I think the one shot go from idea to commercial success at massive scale is a lot less likely than the multi-step process of continually build better and better stuff over time until you get into a position of excellence.
Yeah, that's right. Because if you look at every market, there's a few markets where the current leader came late to the space, usually because the prior leader failed so horribly. But most of the time, the company that's succeeding and winning in a market is the first or second entrant there. They've just continually buoyed their success.
I'd say it was the opposite of lonely because the thing that spurred me to actually release this was seeing kids playing the game in my neighborhood and having fun and being like, this is really good. And seeing them enjoying it and laughing and pointing at the screen and getting together and just wanting to play more. That's awesome.
And the human element was always pervasive, because I did not only receive orders, but people would actually write letters. We wrote letters back then, in the 1990s. People would say how much they were enjoying the game and how their kids were playing the game and so on and so on. So we felt very connected.
And, you know, I think a lot of businesses have to make scary decisions because you're spending, you know, potentially all of the money you have to take a shot at something that you're not sure will succeed. I was very fortunate starting a business like this because it didn't really need any capital. The capital was, well, the several thousand dollars in computers I'd bought by mowing lawns.
And it wasn't much risk. If that hadn't succeeded, I guess I could have figured out how people get mechanical engineering jobs and pursued that. But once it took off and once the orders started coming in and people started writing letters saying they're enjoying the game, I knew I was going to go all out and try to build a company there and succeed. And that was going to be my big goal.
Yeah, that was a very interesting time. Epic had, after my first couple of games, had recruited developers, you know, usually college students, high school students who are just working on their own, had real skills, but didn't have an outlet for their work. Epic had been matchmaking the best artists and programmers together from all over the world.
Like Chaz Jackrabbit was Cliff Belusinski, a high school kid in California who'd made a really cool adventure game together with Ariane Brucey, a demo coder from Holland who'd make amazing graphical stuff and had built a 2D game engine. And it connected them together and a musician, Robert Allen in California.
And by telephone and modem and so on, we were building these little 2D games and having quite a lot of success. There were a bunch of people making thousands of dollars a month while they were still students in royalties from the games that Epic was producing by coordinating with people and publishing through shareware. And that was all going great.
The company had a little office, and we were copying floppy disks and mailing them out. But when Wolfenstein came out, we realized the future of gaming is going to be 3D. there had been a lot of experiments in 3D before that hadn't been great. There were 3D renderings of mazes that were not in real time, and you were always looking north, south, east, or west.
And then there were vector graphics with little wireframes moving around and things, but... You know, Wolfenstein was the first game that was fast enough, you know, running at 30 frames per second. It really felt immersive. It felt like you were there, like you were in this castle of Wolfenstein fighting Nazis. And that was a really amazing and immersive experience.
3D graphics were pretty primitive then. It software followed shockingly fast with Doom, which was a much, much more capable 3D engine, which had, you know, stairs and...
Though it was still what we call two-and-a-half-D, it was environments that were very realistic, textures that were very realistic, a form of lighting that was approximate but incredibly realistic, and just such great artistry and sound effects. It fueled completely visceral and real. You might look at it today from the point of view of a modern...
a game player with 20 teraflops of computing power in your device and say, oh, that's not very impressive. But it was amazing at the time.
You feel that you're there. Yeah. Especially when you turn the lights down in your room and you turn the sound up on your speakers and it will scare you. And you'll feel like, you know, that fireball that's coming at you is going to kill you. That was an amazing time because we hadn't experienced that before. There was nothing like that.
You know, you'd watch a movie, a scary movie or whatever, you know, it was just, this thing that was happening. This was you. This was you in a 3D world.
Well, at first I was really depressed. Because the wizardry of Doom especially was so incredible that I gave up on programming for like six months. I was like, I don't know if I'll be able to compete with this. I have no idea what we're going to do. We just keep making 2D games and hope that the business goes on. But that was the nature of Carmack's wizardry. He had done things that were like...
not just one innovation leap ahead, but like a dozen simultaneously, interplaying in a way that you couldn't pick them apart into their component pieces. But a funny thing happened. Michael Abrash, a long-timer in computer graphics, wrote a book on the techniques for 3D graphics and texture mapping.
And he wrote some articles in one of the programming magazines of the day and explained it and showed assembly code to do texture mapping, drawing these 3D graphics on the screen. And it was actually really simple stuff. I was like, oh, I can do that. And so a bunch of us at Epic independently went off and started writing our own 3D graphics code to figure it out.
And we found at one point we had a number of people dabbling in this, doing different parts of it. And at that point we decide, okay, this is 3D graphics. and 3D gaming is going to completely change the world. We need to go all in on this. And so we took the best people from our best 2D game development teams and put them all together to make a 3D game.
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