Kind: captions
Language: en
Humans are by far the hardest part of
computer graphics because millions of
years of evolution have given us
dedicated brain systems to detect
patterns and faces and infer emotions
and intent because cavemen had to uh
when they see a stranger determine
whether they were likely friendly or
they were might be trying to kill them.
Um, and so people in the world have
extraordinarily detailed expectations of
a face and we can notice imperfections,
especially perfections arising from
computer graphics limitations. Okay, one
part is capturing humans. And so they
built really advanced dedicated hardware
that puts a human in a capture sphere
with dozens of cameras in them taking
high resolution, high frame rate video
of them as they go through a range of
motions. And then capturing the human
face is complicated because the nuance
detail of our faces and how all the
muscles and senas and fat work together
to give us different expressions. So
it's not only about the shape of a
person's face, but it's also about the
entire range of motion that they might
go through. So that's the data problem.
There's a lot of other problems of
computer graphics. You know, there's
technology for rendering hair, which is
really hard because you can't render
every like, again, we know the laws of
physics. It would be easy to just render
every hair. It would just be a billion
times too slow. Um, so you need
approximations that capture the net
effect of hair on rendering and on
pixels uh without calculating every
single interaction of every light with
every strand of hair. Um, that's one
part of it. There's detailed features
for different parts of faces. There's
subsurface scattering because we think
of humans as opaque, but really our our
skin is light travels through it. It's
not completely opaque. And the way in
which light travels through skin has a
huge impact on our appearance. You know,
this is why you there's no way you can
paint a mannequin to look realistic for
a human. You know, it's just a solid
surface. Um, and we'll never have the
sort of detail. You see, that kind of
blew my mind like thinking through that.
I think I heard that sort of the
oiliness of the skin creates very
specific nuanced complex reflections and
then some light is absorbed and travels
through the skin and that creates
textures that are human eyes able to
perceive and it creates the thing that
we consider human whatever that is. All
of that while considering all the
muscles involved in making the nuance
expression just the subtle squinting of
the eyes or the subtle formation of a
smile. It's a subtlety of human faces
that you have to capture like the
difference between a real smile and a
fake smile. But the way to show like
beginning of a formation of a smile that
actually reveals a deep sadness all of
that like when I watch a human face I
can like read that. I could see that you
have to have the tools that in real time
can render something like that and
that's incredibly difficult. That's
right. Getting faces right requires the
interplay of literally dozens of
different systems and aspects of
computer graphics. And if any one of
them is wrong, your eye is completely
drawn to that and you find it on the
wrong side of Uncounty Valley.
The following is a conversation with Tim
Sweeney, a legendary video game
programmer, founder, and CEO of Epic
Games that created many incredible games
and technologies, including the Unreal
Engine and Fortnite, which both
revolutionized the video game industry
and the experience of playing and
creating video
games. This is the Lex Freedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now,
dear friends, here's Tim
Sweeney. When did you first fall in love
with computers and maybe with
programming? I had a brother, Steve
Sweeney, who uh 16 years older than me.
And um at some point when I was a little
kid, he went off to work in California
for a tech company. And he'd gotten one
of the first IBM PCs. And so for one
summer, I think I was about 11, I went
to visit him in California. It's my
first like trip away from my family just
to hang out with him. and he had this
brand new IBM computer and I I learned
to program over the course of a few days
and basic I was just blown away with the
capabilities of computers at the time.
It was unbelievable what they could
accomplish and uh I was just hooked from
that point onward and very much wanted
to be a programmer. Do you remember what
you wrote in basic? Is it a video game
type things? Is it like for loop some
numerical thing? What do you remember?
Yeah, it's funny. I I have a perfectly
vivid memory of all the first things I
learned to program. Okay. I have a hard
time remembering people's names, but
like code really sticks with me. Every
step and every challenge, there were
lessons learned. And you know, some of
which I' I've come to realize were just
like me uh getting over some learning
hurdles, but other things were actually
shortcomings of programming languages.
Uh and the realization that there are
actually better ways. And when a
programmer is learning to program for
the first time, uh, you know, a lot of
what they're facing isn't the challenge
of learning a new art. It's the friction
introduced by failures of programming
language design. And so I've I've
constantly come back to those early
lessons there as I've as I've progressed
and done more and more things including
building programming languages. Yeah,
the friction and the
pain is is the guide to learning in
programming. Like if I were to describe
programming journey that would be marked
by pain and that pain you you shouldn't
escape the pain. The pain is instructive
for you to understand programming
languages. But do you do you remember
what kind of stuff you were writing um
at that time just the early programs?
Yeah, in the early days I wrote a little
bit of everything. I wrote some games.
Uh the first game I wrote on the Apple 2
was uh since I only knew how to program
in text mode. Um the computer would uh
throw asterisks across the screen.
They'd flow from left to right and you'd
have a parenthesis on the right hand
side of the screen and you know look
like a baseball mitt and you're supposed
to catch the asterisks. That was that
was my very first game. It took about a
couple hours to build and tune. Um and I
went from there. But I built a lot of
things. I built databases at different
points. I built a programming language
and a full compiler for a language like
Pascal cuz like I couldn't I didn't know
where you went to buy one of those. So I
made my own. Um, and you one of the
things of one of the fun things of that
time was bulletin boards. Uh, before we
had the internet in the hands of
consumers, you used your modem um, and
you dialed into a local phone number um,
and connected to whoever was running the
computer there. And every town or city
had hundreds of these bulletin boards
run by different people with their own
personalities and themes. Um, and so I
spent a lot of time building a
bordenboard program and learning how to
deal with database management and user
interface and dealing with multiple
users concurrently and things. And so,
uh, I'd probably spend about 10 or
15,000 hours, uh, writing code just on
my own as a kid between like age 10 and,
uh, and, you know, age, uh, age 20
before I actually shipped a program to
the outside world. 10 to 15,000 hours.
What was the value of the hours as a kid
you put in in programming that led to
the success you've had in later life?
Maybe this is by way of advice to
younger people in terms of how they
allocate the hours of their early life.
Yeah. You know, it's not just hours.
It's really striving to
learn to understand what knowledge you
have, what knowledge you lack, and to
continually do experiments and work on
projects that improve your knowledge
base. And I didn't do this with a great
amount of structure or planning. I was
rather just going from project to
project doing things that I thought
would be fun and cool. And with each
project, I learn new things. You know,
learning about how to store and manage
data, learning how to deal with advanced
data structures, how to uh write complex
programs that have deeply nested uh data
and control flow. Um each one of those,
you know, provide a lesson uh
which were later essential. You know,
when uh in 1991, I released my first
game and over the the course of that
decade, we went from, you know, zero
commercial releases to the first
generation Unreal Engine. But, you know,
this was largely just using the
knowledge that I built up over the
previous decade. Um, just doing fun
hobby projects. Um, and if I hadn't done
all that work, there's no way I could
have ever built the things that came
later. All the experimentation and all
the
exploration
somehow contributed, somehow made sense
later on. Like all of that is integrated
somehow in the stuff you build. It's
funny how life works. Like it the pieces
kind of come together eventually. Yeah.
You know, there are definitely karate
good moments. Uh cuz you know, all this
time I was learning math in high school
and in college. I studied mechanical
engineering and so you know, you learn
all kinds of math, vector calcul
calculus and vector math um and matrices
and you know all these related fields uh
physics and stress and strain and uh how
to you know deal with complex physical
systems. Um, and yeah, I wasn't really
sure how engineers would actually make
use of that knowledge. Do you just like
forget about it when you actually go off
to do work or is it do you write down
equations on paper? It was actually not
clear as an early engineering student
what you do. But when I started writing
the first generation Unreal Engine and I
was dealing with 3D math, I was like,
wait, I know this stuff. I learned this
and you know so you know suddenly like
the karate kid you know you get to paint
the fence and uh wax the car and
suddenly put all the pieces together
into you know a 3D engine based on whole
lot of accumulated programming language
and math knowledge often often knowledge
gained without ever anticipating that I
might use it in that way also I think
what's useful is over and over learning
a hard
thing and then showing to yourself, you
know, uh that you can do it, that you
can learn a hard thing. So then when you
come to having to write a 3D engine that
uh in ways that haven't been done
before, you're like, I've I've been
here. I've been here in this experience.
Like I don't know what to do, but we'll
figure it out. We'll learn. I'll learn
all the necessary components. So just
not being afraid of something new.
That's right. and constantly striving to
make connections between these fields
and look for their applications. Long
after I chipped on Unreal Engine, it was
like going back through an engineering
textbook and looking at, oh yeah, I use
that, I use that, I use that. And then I
got to the section on EN values. I'm
like, don't know what the hell this is.
Um but you know it turns out IGEN
vectors and IGEN values were the
critical breakthrough that made the
Google search engine technology work and
stand apart from the rest because they
found if you threw all the links that
existed in the web and you know links
from and two different sites and you put
them in a giant matrix and you conclude
it you found the dominant values then
those vectors described the best search
results for different things. And so
constantly picking up knowledge and
looking for ways to put it together is
is the thing to do. And if you aspire to
be a programmer, you've got to write a
lot of code and you've got to
continually learn new things and
improve. And if you want to be an
artist, you've got to continually draw
artwork of all styles and all kinds and
constantly push yourself to learn more
and more. uh because you you never know
exactly what you're going to end up
doing in the long run, but the more
knowledge you have and the more skills,
the more chance you have putting it
together and being successful. And
whether you're a programmer or an
artist, you should probably take linear
algebra, even though it doesn't make
sense at the time. I found getting
engineering an engineering degree and
then never working in an engineering
field, uh you know, just being a
computer programmer was immensely
valuable.
Um, yeah, I went to University of
Maryland, which for some disciplines,
it's kind of known as a party school,
but they work the engineers to death.
Worked really hard. And if you learn any
engineering discipline, you learn
massive amounts of math and you learn
the rigor of problem solving, you know,
not just what you find from the
Wikipedia article, but going through all
the exercises of solving complex
problems and building up series of
solutions to to derive an answer, it's
it's valuable and it is it embodies the
knowledge that you need as a programmer.
And you know, people often go to
university and think, okay, my goal here
is to get good grades, so I get a
diploma and I prove to an employer that
I'm valuable. like no that's just kind
of the superficial bookkeeping of the
university. The real purpose of all of
this is to learn and whether you learn
formally or you learn on your own. It's
the learnings that are really valuable
in a career. Um and especially if you're
going to be entrepreneurial, it's really
knowing the stuff that matters and not
having the the diplomas. And uh yeah,
there's ever more pressure to make a
build rebuild society more and more
around credentials. Do you have this
certificate? Do you have that proof? But
like you know companies that are focused
on just building great products and
doing great things uh gravitate towards
people who do the great work. Yeah. One
of the great things about
youth is uh there's more freedom.
There's just more time to learn. And
people when they go to high school they
sometimes thinks why I can't wait to get
out of this and be an adult and be free.
But it's not quite freedom. When you get
a job, you start a family. all wonderful
things. We get less more and more busy
and less and less time to learn in the
general sense. Learn whatever the hell
you want. And that that is a wonderful
time in life, the the teenage years, the
early 20s, the 20s, when you could just
learn random Yeah. You know, I
think this is something that's kind of
changing in America. Um there's so much
focus on grades and homework and um
structure around kids' lives. You know,
when I was growing up, you know, my mom
would feed me and my neighbors, you
know, my my neighbors and moms would
feed them breakfast and they'd, you
know, be like, "Well, be back by dark."
Um, yeah. And, you know, we'd go out and
we'd play and we'd do all sorts of
things. We'd, you know, explore the
woods. We'd build go-karts. We'd uh, you
know, salvage old pieces of electronics
and build you what we thought were our
space uh, spacecraft control panels um,
for the, you know, fake spaceships we
were building as play. And uh we'd have
anor enormous amount of freedom and uh
you know from basically being a little
kid through um through the time I went
off to college um it had an enormous
amount of free time and some people just
used that and wasted and watched TV.
Some people socialized um and some
people really got into serious projects.
Uh so many people at all times were
doing cool things. You know I was
programming. I was learning to build
things. I was uh you know before I was
releasing games to the world, I'd be
like yeah having neighborhood folks over
to play the things I was working on and
check them out and sometimes they're
impressed and sometimes they weren't. Um
and they'd have their own projects and
often we'd have spare time jobs and
everybody was entrepreneurial like
everybody, you know, had a side gig.
Sometimes you go around and mow people's
lawns or you'd, you know, you know, rake
the leaves up and, you know, earn money.
And uh the freedom there and the the
organic learning that occurred there I
think is something that is really
critical to the American experience I I
worry is increasingly going away as
society is ever more protective and
sheltering um and makes it harder to get
these experiences.
So on the video game side when did you
first fall in love with video games?
I've had a funny relationship with games
because my real
aspiration has always been to program
cool stuff. I get more enjoyment out of
programming than anything else in the
world. Um, and so you know the my first
really too formative experience with
games were playing this game called
Adventure for the Atari 2600 was like
you moved this dot around the screen and
picked up objects like swords and fought
dragons and invaded castles and solved
puzzles. Very very simple iconic stuff,
you know, rather than realistic
graphics. And then the other game that I
really got immersed in was Zork, uh,
which was a text adventure game. It
would tell you where you are and what
you see and you type in commands like go
north or pick up sword or open door and
explore a world that way. So the game
didn't have any graphics but in your
mind you had this elaborate picture of
what you were seeing there. And uh it
really brought in inspired imagination
more than other things. And playing
those games led me to go off and want to
learn to program everything that I saw
there. Um and that drove a lot of my
programming. I learned how to move a
player around the screen. And I learned
how to, you know, build a design tool.
So I could build castles and save them
off and then play them in a game. And I
realized there was a separation between
the tools that you use to build a game
and the game itself. And that if the
more powerful tools you had, the more
creativity you could unleash in yourself
or others. Um, and you know, I learned
all the programming techniques that
supported games. How to parse text, you
know, pick up sword and go north. How do
you make that sentence into an actual
series of commands on the computer? Um,
and that was really, really exciting.
Um, I have to say until the time that
Fortnite came out, I played video games
primarily to learn what they were doing
so that I could go off and do that
myself. You know, I'd sit down, you
know, when Wolfenstein came out and then
Doom came out. Um, I'd go through and
look at it pixel by pixel. I'd move the
mouse very slightly and look exactly
what was happening to figure out that's
great. What technique was being used
there and that that was a puzzle solving
at a grand scale and it was so fun.
Uh so so take me there in the the early
90s. So you launched Epic Games in
1991. So your the writing of your first
big video game uh ZZT. What was it like?
What was the technical challenges? What
was the psychological challenges of
building
that? It was a funny project because I
didn't start out to build a video game.
Um, I just moved from an Apple 2 that so
my my brother bought my family an Apple
2 right after I'd visited him in
California. So I've done programming on
that for a few years, learned a lot of
techniques, but weren't many Apple 2
users around still uh by the time that
cycle came to an end. Um, and so I just
got an IBM PC uh of my own. Um, I was
learning to program and I realized I
needed a text editor. So I started
writing a text editor. You know, a text
editor is a program to edit text files.
you have logic to move the cursor around
and let people type things and backspace
and delete and do all those you know
mundane actions and you know one night I
was like finished it up and I was like
well okay I have a text editor but this
is pretty boring and so I made the
cursor uh into a smiley face character
and I had the like different characters
you could place in this document perform
different gameplay actions. Some would
be walls and some would kill you and
some would uh be moving objects that
could uh fly around the screen. And so
this text editor I made evolved into a
little game editor. So, I was building
these levels for a game. I put a lot of
time into like building an editor and a
primitive set of objects, about 20 or 30
different objects, enough to build a
really cool and compelling game, but not
so many that players would lose track of
what they're seeing. I started off just
building different uh game levels. You
know, the idea is you'd be on a series
of board. They'd be connected by, you
know, going north 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 you know,
this was the game that became ZCT. And
uh I was having fun with it, uh building
it and playing it, but I didn't know if
it would really work. So, uh I did this
experiment. I started inviting neighbors
over, like some adults, some kids of all
different ages, and I sat them down from
it and say like, "Here's a game I made.
Uh figure it out." Yeah. 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 if they were
able to uh you know, discover it all for
themselves. You know, today we call this
a, you know, user experience test. Um,
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.
Um, and just iteratively polished the
game until I felt was good. And I put it
out um, 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 uh
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 shareer model you know so I
didn't just build this one game. I built
a a trilogy of three games. Um, Mhm. I
released the first one for free. And I
said, hey, if you like this, buy the two
sequels. Um, and I included my parents
mailing address and uh said, you know,
send us $30 and uh you can get the
sequels to this game. And the check
started coming in within a few days. And
I was making like getting three or four
orders a day. I was making like a $100 a
day. I'm like, woo, I'm rich. Cuz, you
know, being a 20-year-old, that was like
a pretty big deal. What did that feel
like just getting money and probably
feeling this immense success from
something you've created? Well, you
know, I've looked at money always just
as a tool to help you fund accomplishing
cool things. Um, and you know, having
enough to do the things you want to do
is the critical thing. Um, it's always
been just very utilitarian. But the
knowledge that other people all around
the country and all then, you know, in a
month later all around the world were
playing the game, that was that was
mind-boggling. You know, that me like
this this little kid who'd put out a
game on a local bulletin board uh could
be doing international business and
shipping discs all over the world um to
players, you know, because the software
was spreading on its own was just
magical. Like, and that was a new thing
for software. Like that did not happen
with mechanical devices. like you
manufactured one, you sold it to
somebody and they had it and that was
it. But software could spread. Um 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. You know, we saw Microsoft as
a big juggernaut company at at the time.
But I was like, hey, you know, if Epic
does games good enough, you know, we
could accomplish what they've got
accomplished with operating systems. And
the sky was the limit. And I I think
this is the the age we live in now. It's
you don't have to be an industrialist
manufacturing physical products. Anybody
who builds anything um digitally if it's
good enough you can reach the entire
world and build the you know next
Microsoft or Meta or Apple or Google or
or Epic Games. It's such a cool origin
story though. You start out building a
text editor. So you're looking at this
project, you're playing around with it,
you're building up the tools. It's it's
such an inspiring moment cuz uh a lot of
us start out building a project and to
allow yourself to see the
potential pivots, the potential
trajectories that can go is really nice
to sit back, allow yourself to be bored
and like ah I'm going to go this way. I
mean that's like a crossroads. You came
to a crossroads. I mean you built uh you
know compilers, you you designed your
own programming language, you built
compilers, databases, all these things
you mentioned and you started building a
text editor and then here it came to
this crossroad. I'm going to make this
fun and then from there you know one of
the most legendary gaming companies was
created. It's kind of cool like that
that that's an inspiring thing for sort
of developers like be open to the
possibility of creating something you
didn't plan to create and just go with
it. Right. That's cool. Yeah. And it was
a bunch of learnings emerged really
quickly there. The the neat thing I did
with CCT was I didn't just release the
game. I also released the editor with
it. I built this tool so I could make
these ZCT boards that people could play,
but I also gave it to all the players
themselves. And um you know like 30
years later I still run into people you
when I go to a game industry event it
was like you know I grew up playing ZZT
and you know here's an adult who grew up
playing my
game and it was because it enabled
anybody to become a creator too. had,
you know, this little board editor and
it also had a little scripting language
so you could learn a little bit of
programming in it too. And um it it kind
of impressed and it really set a
formative principle of Epic which was
that you know the company's mission is
to make awesome entertainment but also
awesome tools and to share those tools
with everybody so they can build their
own amazing things too. And um you know
when we got into Unreal Engine a few
years later uh the interplay between us
building a game and us building a tools
uh 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 um we've been able
to weather the ups and downs of the game
industry. It's a a brutal place uh for
companies. um 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 uh it really set a
principle in our culture that uh that's
p persevered and is continually brought
to their forefront. But on the editor
front that's such a fascinating
philosophy that you always allow people
to create their own worlds. You have an
engine from which you simulate the world
that the game is in. You have the actual
game and you also have the freedom for
creators to create various you know in
Fortnite islands
uh of their own. So it's like with with
everything you ship that that freedom to
create is always there. That's really
interesting. Yeah. And something we we
aim to do more and more fully over time.
You know, 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, you know, a
social ecosystem where people can make
friends and voice chat and get together
and parties. 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.
Um, and you know, our 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. If we could just linger on the
'9s. Uh, so you said bulletin boards.
Maybe you can explain what that's like
and also explain the birth of the
internet, what that was like. What was
the what was the internet like in the
'90s? So, the internet is a funny thing.
It started out as this defense
department um research project called
the arponet, the advanced research
project agency network and um it was
kind of like this revered secret thing.
Uh they became more and more open as
they connected universities. Uh
universities connected to the internet
and the you know mid1 1980s and so if
you were at a prestigious institution
with access to computers you could get
on there. But a consumer back then, we
just had these modems. You know, this
thing you plug into your phone line. Um,
and it dials up a phone number and then,
you know, it sends you wild sound
effects over the over the telephone line
to send digital signals back and forth.
And these were really slow. Three, you
know, the first modem I had was 300 W.
That means 30 characters per second of
data. So, you're like sitting there
watching a sentence like slowly emerge
character by character as you're going
online. But, yeah, that's how we got
online and we talked with each other. So
you dial up uh to a local bulletin
board. It'll be run by a person. Usually
they have a computer or two sitting in
their kitchen or something that's
running the bulletin board and um they
have a small community of a few hundred
users um all competing to connect to
that one phone line. Um it was often
busy and you couldn't get in and uh the
more popular bulletin boards were
hardest to get to. Um nice. We had all
kinds of communities develop you know
and you could see like there was the
programming communities where people
talked about programming. There was the
news and events you know uh community. I
was lived in the outskirts of Washington
DC. So that was like a big thing. But
then there was like the pirate community
where they're sharing pirated Apple 2
games and you know very different uh
community ethos and mantras out there
but all all you know all really nice and
also very small. Um these things these
boards couldn't grow to the size of
Facebook cuz your phone line couldn't
take that many calls. Um and you know
then uh then later in the 1990s the the
internet which had been fostered in
these colleges started opening up to the
public and anybody could connect to it
and suddenly the world took on a life of
its own. It became much much easier to
reach a global audience faster and you
would start shipping games to the
internet which is a bit of a crazy thing
to do cuz you're supposed to have like a
you know a physical copy but to to post
on the internet is pretty innovative.
Even share war is pretty innovative.
Yeah, you know, it's been a funny
transition for the game business. You
know, Epic started out making share
games distributed digitally. Um, but you
know, as the first 3D games took off,
like Wolfenstein, then Doom from ID
Software and then Unreal from us. Um,
took off, you know, to reach a huge
audience of millions of users, we had to
go into retail stores. So we worked with
a retail publisher and they made a box
and he put CDROMs in the box and um and
you know then the world started
transitioning back to digitally like and
that transition didn't start well right
but the initial transition of gaming to
digital was all bit torrent all piracy
um and you know there horror stories
about games that would uh you know sell
like 100,000 copies but have 2 million
users um cuz most people pirated it um
and then you know Steam came along and
uh introduced digital distribution ation
and uh made digital distribution of
legit games so convenient um that most
players moved away from piracy towards
that and uh and you know their practices
were then followed by others and the
early digital industry uh took form.
Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean pirates
do lead the way for
innovation the same as the story of
Spotify. You basically I think most
people when they derive value from
things like video games want to pay for
those video games. They just want it to
be easy. And so that the same thing with
music with
Spotify. Uh but maybe just staying on
the '9s uh there are going to be a lot
of indie game developers who listen to
us talking today. Can you uh go back to
that mindset and try to derive some
wisdom and advice to those folks when
you were just a solo developer, maybe
just a small group of people
uh creating your early games that
eventually became this
uh huge gaming company. But in the early
days, what what uh what were you going
through? What were the ups and downs? Uh
what did it take to sort of stay strong
and persevere?
Well, you know, one of the critical
things that Epic always worked hard to
do was to make something different um
that nobody else was doing. Um and to
you tried to satisfy a small audience
rather than competing globally with the
game juggernauts. You know, back in the
1990s, Epic was new, but Electronic Arts
and Activision and the other big
publishers had been around for a decade,
and they were huge companies. Um they
had giant retail distribution networks.
you know, if I tried to make a game and
then convince them to publish it, I I
doubt I could have had a chance and I
doubt uh that if even if I made a
successful game that I would have made
much money from it, though they might
have. Um, and you know, so the really
unique angle to Epic then was
sharewware. And that was just the idea
that if we distribute our game
differently, then we can reach a much
larger audience than these bigger
competitors by virtue of this first
episode of the game being free. You
know, it was kind of the advent of what
later became free to play. Um, and the
logic of that is just as true now as it
was then. It's if the thing is free and
anybody can get into it, then it's going
to spread from friend to friend is
people bring, you know, their real world
friends into into the games they're
playing and uh, you know, have the
opportunity to build up a community
around that, you know. So, the other
lesson there was just minimize the
friction of people getting into your
game, make it easy to get into and make
it
fun. And I think the other, well, I was
very fortunate. ZZT was a funny game. It
was not like much like any other game.
It was had much worse graphics because
it was all just text characters uh
smiley faces and you know other Greek
letters and things participating in this
game simulation. They were kind of
iconic representations of characters
rather than real ones. And you know this
was decades into the age of real
graphical games with interesting
graphics. Um, and so it wasn't even
trying to compete in that area, but it
was able to compete in a different area,
which is that, you know, it wasn't just
my the three games I'd made and shipped
as a trilogy that were successful and
drove the success of the product. It was
the fact I released an editor and
there's a whole community around it. And
you see that that that trend has
repeated itself. Like there was, you
know, ZZT was one of before that there
was Bill Budg's pinball construction
set. That was a 1980s Apple game that
let users build their own pinball
tables. And since then, you've had some
of the world's most successful games
follow that path like Minecraft. You can
build your own stuff. Roblox, you know,
Fortnite creative and underreal editor
for Fortnite. You know, games that
become platforms for other people to
build stuff was a real opportunity. You
know, I think the big thing to realize
is for indie developers right now is
like there's massive massive competition
in every major genre. And um it's very
unlikely that unless you just happen to
be the world's best at a particular
thing that you're going to release a
game in an existing highly competitive
genre and win. Um a much better chance
of success uh is in releasing something
that hasn't been done before being
really unique and reaching an audience
even if big or medium size or small
reaching an audience and becoming really
popular with that making some money from
it and being able to reinvest and then
expand towards your ultimate dream. You
know, I think the oneshot uh go from
idea to commercial success at massive
scale is a lot less likely uh than the
multi-step process of continually build
better and better stuff over time until
you get into a position of excellence.
And constantly try to do something that
others aren't doing. Yeah, that's right.
Because if you look at every market, um
there's a few markets where the current
leader came late to the space. um
usually because the the prior leader
failed so horribly. Um but most of the
time the you know the company that's
succeeding and winning in a market is
the first or second entrant there. Um
they've just continually bullied their
success. Great advice, fascinating. But
on a human level, was it lonely? Was it
scary? You sitting there as a developer?
I'd say it was uh it was the opposite of
lonely because uh you know 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. Um and seeing
them enjoying it and laughing and
pointing at the screen and you know
getting together and just wanting to
play more. That's awesome. Um yeah, so
and and the human element was always
pervasive, you know, because I I not
only receive orders, but people would
actually write letters, you know, we
wrote letters back then in the 1990s. Um
people would say how much they were
enjoying the game and how their kids
were playing the game and so on and so
on. Um so you know felt very connected.
Um and you know I think a lot of
businesses have to make scary decisions
uh because you're spending you know
potentially all the money you have to
take a shot at something that you're not
sure will succeed. Uh 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. Um, 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,
um, once it took off and once the 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 like
going to be, you know, my big goal.
So, I'm sure people know, but uh Epic
Games was created in 1991 and went on to
uh transform the gaming industry several
times. Uh one of which is Unreal Engine.
So, let's talk through the origin story
of that. You said that uh when
Wolfenstein and uh Doom came out, that
changed everything. So, take me to that
moment. Yeah, that that was a very
interesting time. Epic had uh after my
first couple of games that had recruited
developers, you know, usually college
students, high school students who are
just working on their own, had real
skills uh but didn't have an outlet for
their work. Um Epic had been matchmaking
the best artists and programmers
together from all over the world. Like
Chaz Jackrabbit was Cliff Buzzinski, a
high school kid in California, had made
a really cool adventure game together
with Arian Brucey, a demo coder from
Holland who' make amazing graphical
stuff and had built a 2D game engine. Um
I connected them together and a musician
Robert Allen in California and they you
know by telephone and modem and so on.
We were we were building these little 2D
games and uh having quite a lot of
success. You know there are a bunch of
people making thousands of dollars a
month um while they were still students
um and royalties from the games that
Epic was kind of producing and by
coordinating people with people and
publishing um through sharewware. Um and
that was all going great. Uh the company
had a little office and we were you know
copying floppy floppy discs and mailing
them out. But um when Wolfenstein came
out, we realized like the future of
gaming is going to be 3D. Um it there
had been a lot of experiments in 3D
before that hadn't been great. You know,
there were 2D ma there 3D renderings of
mazes that were not in real time and you
were always looking north, southeast or
west. Um and then there were vector
graphics with little wireframes moving
around and things. But uh yeah,
Wolfenstein was the first game that was
fast enough, you know, running at 30
frames per second that it really felt
immersive. It felt like you were there,
like you were, you know, in this castle
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 2 and 1/ halfD was
environments that were very realistic
textures that were very realistic uh you
know a form of lighting uh that was
approximate but incredibly realistic and
it just such great artistry and sound
effects it it feel completely visceral
um and and real um yeah You might you
might look at it today from a you know
point of view of a a modern uh you know
game player with uh you know 20
teraflops of computing power in your
device and say oh that's not very
impressive but it was amazing at the
time. I mean for me just side to to
pause on that I think
Wolfenstein was one of the most uh
amazing moments of my own life just
being able to like you said in real time
move about a threedimensional world. I
just remember just like just moving
around just in like what is that feeling
like? I mean, you feel transported into
another world. You feel that you're
there. Yeah. And especially you turn the
lights down in your room and you turn
the sound up on your speakers and it
will scare you. Uh and you'll you'll
feel like you know that fireball that's
coming at you is going to kill you. Uh
that was an amazing time cuz we hadn't
experienced that before. There was
nothing like that. Uh you know, you'd
watch a movie, a scary movie or
whatever, but you know, it was just this
thing that was happening. This was you.
This was you in a 3D world.
So, uh how did that how did that change
Epic this realization that the future of
gaming is going to be 3D? Well, at first
I was really depressed. I I fig cuz the
wizardry of Doom especially was so
incredible that I gave up on programming
for like 6 months. I was like I never be
able to compete with this. I have no
idea what we're going to do. Um we just
keep making 3D 2D games and hope that
the business goes on. But um uh like
that was the nature of Carmax 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 um
funny thing happened. Uh Michael Abbrash
uh longtimer in computer graphics wrote
a book
on the techniques for 3D uh graphics and
texture mapping and he wrote some
articles in a in one of the programming
magazines of the day and um explained it
and showed assembly code to do texture
mapping, you know, drawing these 3D
graphics on the screen and it was
actually really simple stuff. I was
like, "Oh, I can do that." And uh and
you know so a bunch of us at Epic
independently went off and uh wrote our
started writing our own 3D graphics code
to figure it out. And um uh we we found
at one point we had a number of people
dabbling in this doing different parts
of it. And uh at that point we decide
okay this is 3D graphics is 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. Um 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 um everybody was like
trying different disciplines to see what
they were best at and um it was a
combination of a bunch of people uh who
came together to make Unreal. I'd
initially volunteered to make the 3D
editor um for the thing and James
Schmaltz who' made Epic Pinball. Epic
Pinball. Now, that wasn't a crazy game.
This was one of the 2D sharer games. He
made it while he was in college and he
was making like $30,000 a month from,
you know, the royalties from this game
because everybody had wanted an awesome
pinball game, massively successful. But,
uh, he was he was a multi-disiplinary
person. He wrote the code for the game,
the art for the game, and did basically
everything. And and the code was 30,000
lines of assembly language, right? And
so, uh, he was initially going to write
the 3D engine. Um, and I was going to
write the editor and he sent me the his
code so I could integrate into the
editor. It was like this giant pile of
assembly code. I was like, hm, 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, uh, Cliff,
who' 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 Bazinski was customer number one
for it. um starting to go off and build
levels and James Schmaltz was building
awesome creatures, sending them to me. I
get them in implementing game and then
we brought in an animator to bring them
into life and we brought in more and
more people until at the peak of Unreal
one development. Um we had about 20
people um working on which was a huge
team for the time and was uh really
stretching Epic's finances nearly to the
breaking point. Mhm. Um we barely
survived and almost ran out of money a
number of times, but uh somehow we
always pulled through and um it was a
crazy project because it was three and a
half years of development in a game that
we always thought was 6 months from
shipping and uh you it was like a yeah
three and a half years of 70 or 80 hour
weeks for most everybody working on the
project. Um not even knowing what
problems we need to solve next because
we were so immersed in the current ones.
Um, were there moments when you were
losing hope that this might take too
long and the company will run out of
money? We were uh I was we were always
very financially stressed. Um, so I was
continually worried about that. I had
total confidence so that we'd work out
all the technical and artistic problems
cuz you know we knew the pieces and it
was largely a matter of typing code in
and solving some problems and kind of
like we knew we could ship a version of
it. And uh the thing that was
continually really interesting was the
ongoing discovery of new new techniques
as we went, you know, cuz 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. Um then
colored dynamic lights uh with some
shadow casting capabilities statically
or moving lights without shadows and um
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 you
know made a number of leaps ahead of the
state-of-the-art at the time. Um uh
yeah, it was really crazy but like I
think most companies uh wouldn't have
survived that but the sheer talent of
the people involved uh made it possible
and that's Epic has often done things
that most companies will have failed at
and we succeed like not because of
awesome management or awesome planning
um or awesome financing but because of
the sheer talent and willpower of the
people involved to make it happen. Uh
what about the uh interdisciplinary
aspect of it like you said sort of
artists, engineers or programmers,
designers, all of them working together?
What what what was that the 20 people?
What was the dynamic there like working
insane hours? Like what was it like to
sort of make a team like that work
together well as an orchestra to to
actually deliver the game?
Yeah, that that's one of the really
unique things to exist in gaming. Not in
normal big tech companies which are just
engineering and businessdriven, but
gaming really does require all the best
people across all the creative
disciplines working together.
Um, and you know, Epic had grown
organically by recruiting people with
awesome talent. Um, we were we always
had a limited budget. But we could never
pay to hire, you know, 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. And
um, you know, so everybody was very new
to this um, and uh, didn't have any
assumptions about how companies worked.
And so, you know, you put all these
people together and um, you know, that
it was really a constant interplay of
talent as people were learning how to
work together as a team. Um, like nobody
had management experience. Most people
hadn't shipped a game before they worked
with Epic. Um, and we were figuring out
as we went. Uh, but it was a constant
iterative cycle. You know, every we'd
make several new versions of the game
every day. Uh, read a new compile,
introduce a new feature or fix some
bugs, get it to artists, artist improve
their levels, um, 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 the speed at
which that improves prod