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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We didn't really know what we were doing at the time. None of us had ever shipped a 3D game, and most of us were still learning, but everybody was trying different disciplines to see what they were best at, and It was a combination of a bunch of people who came together to make Unreal. I'd initially volunteered to make the 3D editor for the thing, and James Schmaltz had made Epic Pinball.
Epic Pinball. Now, that wasn't a crazy game. This was one of the 2D shareware games. He made it while he was in college, and he was making like $30,000 a month from the royalties from this game, because everybody had wanted an awesome pinball game. It was massively successful. But it was He was a multidisciplinary person.
He wrote the code for the game, the art for the game, and did basically everything. And the code was 30,000 lines of assembly language. And so he was initially going to write the 3D engine, and I was going to write the editor, and he sent me his code so I could integrate it into the editor. It was like this giant pile of assembly code. I was like, hmm, why don't I just write this myself?
And so James instead started going off and building 3D models and 3D animations using the tools at the time. And so... And Cliff had done a lot of design work and built the levels on Jazz Jacket, went off and started learning basics of level design. And so I was writing this editor and Cliff Blizinski was customer number one for it, starting to go off and build levels.
And James Schmaltz was building awesome creatures, sending them to me, I'd get them implemented in game. And we brought in an animator to bring them into life. And we brought in More and more people until at the peak of Unreal 1 development, we had about 20 people working on it, which was a huge team for the time. It was really stretching Epic's finances nearly to the breaking point.
We barely survived and almost ran out of money a number of times, but somehow we always pulled through. It was a crazy project because it was three and a half years of development in a game that we always thought was six months from shipping. And... It was like three and a half years of 70 or 80 hour weeks for most everybody working on the project.
Not even knowing what problems we'd need to solve next because we were so immersed in the current ones.
We were always very financially stressed, so I was continually worried about that. I had total confidence that we'd work out all the technical and artistic problems, because we knew the pieces, and it was largely a matter of typing code in and solving some problems. We knew we could ship a version of it, and
The thing that was continually really interesting was the ongoing discovery of new techniques as we went. Because at the time, Quake had shipped, it had a little bit of dynamic lighting. Unreal really pushed dynamic lighting much harder than anybody else had done before. Then colored dynamic lights with some shadow casting capabilities statically, or moving lights without shadows.
figured out how to do volumetric fog, so you could have foggy areas that were full of lights, and you get the kind of glow of the lights standing out in the fog and affecting the appearance of the level. A whole lot of amazing techniques came together to build a game that made a number of leaps ahead of the state of the art at the time. Yeah, it was really crazy, but like...
I think most companies wouldn't have survived that, but the sheer talent of the people involved made it possible. Epic has often done things that most companies would have failed at, and we succeed not because of awesome management or awesome planning or awesome financing, but because of the sheer talent and willpower of the people involved to make it happen.
Yeah, that's one of the really unique things that exist in gaming. Not in normal big tech companies, which are just engineering and business driven, but gaming really does require all the best people across all the creative disciplines working together. And Epic had grown organically by recruiting people with awesome talent. We always had a limited budget.
We could never bid up people's salaries and hire them away by paying them more. We just had to find awesome people who were at the beginning of their career and put them together. So everybody was very new to this and didn't have any assumptions about how companies worked. And so you put all these people together and
It was really a constant interplay of talent as people were learning how to work together as a team. Nobody had management experience. Most people hadn't shipped a game before they worked with Epic. And we were figuring out as we went. But it was a constant iterative cycle. We'd make several new versions of the game every day.
Read a new compile, introduce a new feature, or fix some bugs, get it to the artist, the artist... improve their levels, continue building stuff, and then we see what they're doing in their levels, like, ah, I see what you need now. We'd constantly be improving the tools. And just the iterative process and the speed at which that improves products is the critical element to success in games.
The slower the iteration cycle, if you make a build every week and you go through one iteration every week, you're going to be way, way, way worse by the end of your project than a game company that makes new stuff every day. And that was the magic that happened together. And it wasn't, there was really nothing but passion and everybody's individual dedication to it that made it work.
Well, we'd all gravitated towards a schedule, a work schedule that maximized productivity. And that usually meant waking up late. I'd get to like, usually get to work around noon. Um, and we're usually work till like 2 AM or, or so, um, 3 AM sometimes. And, you know, I didn't have anything else going on in my life. So it was really just work and sleep and occasional eating. Um, and, uh,
I found I always needed eight or nine hours of sleep a night. Without good sleep, I would just become a zombie and wouldn't be nearly at my best. So I always needed to get sleep. But I didn't need anything else going on. So the programming itself was so energizing and drawing. So it was three and a half years of that during the project. mostly spent programming.
Um, I'd say probably 60 hours a week of programming, five hours a week of coordinating with other people and iterating and, you know, sitting down with them and looking at what's going on in screen and figuring out what they needed. Maybe five hours of business stuff. Um, you know, there's a good division at labor, uh, labor then.
Um, I didn't have a big executive team, but it was like basically myself running the technical and development part of the company and Mark rain, uh, running the business part of it, doing deals and, uh, You know, maxing out his credit card and going around the world, bringing in sources of revenue to keep the company funded.
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