Exclusive: Epic Games’ CEO says ‘most exciting days still ahead’

Epic Games continues to develop video games. The Cary-based game company is showcasing a brand new PC and mobile game, Battle Breakers, at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) this week in San Francisco. That game joins Paragon, Unreal Tournament, Fortnite and Spyjinx in Epic’s library of titles currently in some form of development.

But its Unreal Engine 4 game technology is now being used across every imaginable industry. For example, at GDC Chevy is unveiling a brand new commercial that was shot using augmented reality technology from ad agency The Mill and featuring virtual Camaros created using UE4. Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic will reveal that UE4 was used to create the droid K2-SO from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story during a GDC panel.

It’s in the midst of this expansion beyond gaming that Epic’s founder and CEO will be honored with the GDC Lifetime Achievement Award at the 17th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards. Sweeney talks about this honor, as well as the future of gaming and technology, in this exclusive interview.

What exactly, you know at GDC you have a lifetime achievement award when you look ahead to things. What excites you today when you see that road map.

Looking at all the momentum for change in the industry right now, I feel like the most exciting days are still ahead. So, approximately we’ve just had 26 years of practice for this stuff that’s coming out now.

As you were making the leap from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 4, were you thinking all of these other verticals?

The big effort in UE4 was to create an engine that was capable of photorealism using photogrammetry at the core of it, physically-based rendering and these other advanced automates that try to simulate actual reality, as opposed to some scionized version of computer graphics. We didn’t anticipate how large it would go. And these customers found us. After we released UE4 free to be downloadable by anyone in the world, these customers came straight to it. They made a lot of progress and they caught us. That’s the software business model of the future. Zero barrier to entry, make the tool as ubiquitous as possible and everybody’s creativity is completely unleashed.

It’s changed from the days when we had like 10 customers and it cost a quarter million dollars to get access to the Unreal Engine.

How often are you getting new companies on board with Unreal?

What happens is literally every week we hear about some crazy thing that people are using our engine for. Last year, it was NASA training their astronauts in VR using Unreal Engine. A lot of it results from this core philosophy that we don’t try to limit or water down the engine so you hit a glass ceiling.

We want to make sure the engine is super scalable, so if you have a really awesome team with great developers you can take it to a level even beyond what we imagined. A lot of the fact that the engine is succeeding in all these different industries is probably because of the fact that the engine doesn’t attempt to limit people.

You’re a big fan of cars in real life. What’s it like seeing McLaren, Chevy, Jaguar, BMW, McLaren and Toyota all getting involved with your technology?

It’s amazing, and they’re really pushing us, too. The funny thing about game development is we’ve always been able to cheat to an extent. If we couldn’t render a certain type of object, we’d just render a different type of object instead. We had control over what we were designing so we could do that. McLaren has to absolutely be able to recreate the paint and the carbon fiber and all the real materials that exists in that car in real-time 3D.

It’s forced us to solve problems that we wouldn’t have solved otherwise. Same thing with architecture pre-visualization, you have to be able to render wood and glass and metal that’s perfect. Because they’re going to actually build real buildings based on these pre-visualizations and they better look right.

How has opening Unreal up to everyone impacted the games Epic makes?

It’s funny, working with McLaren on that project to push the material rendering capabilities forward, we started to notice carbon fiber and isotropic pinch lined up in Paragon characters. There’s a lot of synergy there and how each part benefits from the other’s work.

Gaming is right in the company name, but do you still consider yourself at core a game company with all these other business opportunities going on?

We’re a game maker and engine maker and we build both together to the maximum benefit of each. It’s incredibly powerful to not only have control over the game experience we’re creating, but also the technology, and to be able to share that with the rest of the industry.

These teams that work on these special projects of ours at Epic, they’re working on games when they’re not working on these special projects. So we move people around a lot. We’re still a games company. The cinematics team that are working on this Chevy project, they’re all going to be working on some marketing material for one of our games at some point in the near future.

That’s one of the strengths of Epic. Even though the engine is used for other things than gaming, the fact that we make games keeps us very honest with the engine. We know that it can scale, we know that it can produce amazing visuals because we want to be able to make our games look great as well.

We love that the engine can do loads of other things. We actually feel that where all these use cases are going helps us get ready for the future. Games aren’t just going to be traditional console games. They’re going to be AR, VR, mixed reality. Who knows what crazy, multiplayer social gaming we’re going to have years from now. So this gets us ready for the future.

This Chevy project also incorporates Google Tango. What’s your take on that technology?

We have a good relationship with our friends at Google and for GDC we wanted to add an extra little bit of spectacular there. The whole concept of a virtual camera with six degrees of freedom is super powerful. We’ve done this sort of virtual filming inside of video games before, but to be able to do that on a consumer device where you have a portal to the virtual world is really neat.

We were like “Hey Google, we would love to be able to walk around the car without a lot of crazy hardware. Do you think the Tango could do this?” It was just a way of incorporating their cool, new, latest version of their tech. It’s not AR. It’s purely a virtual portal. It’s just like shooting on your phone, where if you go to the car you can do a close-up or whatever. We just thought it would be a neat way to show how you can control the virtual world. They’ve been really cool. They’ve helped us with this. It’s great.