Before I get started on the actual history of the game, I just wanted to share a story on how a game came into my life and changed it forever. The year was 1998 and I had been playing First Person Shooters since the days of Duke Nukem 3D. I had a good friend back then by the name of John Waber. We were always competitive about who had the fastest machine back then. One day he called me over to his house (Usually to brag about some new piece of hardware as his rig was always one step ahead of mine at the time. This was because he was doing Tool and Die work and I was waiting tables and take classes at the local college) to show me a new game he had just bought from Media Play (back then MP had good deals on video games).

I went over to his house and heard his speaker blasting some cool music but it didn't sound like any band I had heard. I go into his den and see him playing something. As I got closer I noticed some really cool colors and textures. He says, "Watch this game for a second." As I sat and watch this game I felt myself getting more and more drawn into it. I told him this game is absolutely unreal, "What is the name of it?" He laughs and says "Unreal." I tell him he is a jerk and to tell me. Which he replies, "No, really, it is called Unreal."

I didn't realize at that moment how much a game would change my life. Besides being the first time I saw the game, it is when I knew I would need to upgrade my little Pentium MMX and Orchid Voodoo 1. John's rig was a Pentium II running a Voodoo 2 (the V2 was still pretty expensive back then). Remember at that time the world was being dominated by Quake which was very fun and impressive but had some seriously bland colors and textures (irocinally it is 2004 and the next Id game, while looking very cool, is still dark and not so impressive textures) and you didn't need anything other than an Open GL class card to make it look good. That is when I first started down the path of becoming one of the biggest Unreal Fanboys in the world. Now let's get into the Tech itself.

A lot of people may not know that the Unreal Universe wasn't the brain-child of Epic Games as you know it (at that time they were known as Epic MegaGames). Even though today when you hear of anything Unreal today you think of Cliffy B, Mark Rein or Tim Sweeney. Rather the original concept idea came from a young programmer named James Schmalz. James had a very cool idea of making a terrain based game but was having some problems with bringing it to life. This led to one of the most important meetings in gaming history, he met with Tim Sweeney to talk about his ideas.

Where did the Unreal Engine start? Well some of the following information is directly from the two men themselves. A HUGE thanks goes out to both James and Tim for helping me out with the article. First up with have James Schmalz thoughts on those early days.

"My first memories..... Well, I was trying to make a terrain based game, so I was programming these cool terrain rendering routines. I must have tried 20 different algorithms to find the fastest one. At that stage everything was written in assembly language. Let me tell you that was a bitch. Then I decided we needed buildings so I jumped into some BSP work. I remember since I didn't have an editor at that point, I had to plot out all the points of the building in hand on graph paper with a pencil."

Once those two hashed out a game plan the following happened. (Tim's Thoughts)

"The first thing related to Unreal that we had up and running was a 100% assembly language terrain and BSP rendering engine written by James Schmalz. The style was very much like Magic Carpet, with a fantasy theme and a really amazing (for the time) animated dragon flying around."

Around this time the original Unreal Team started to form. Once again Tim.

"At that point, our general thinking was that James Schmalz would write the renderer and game, I'd write the editor, Cliff Bleszinski would build levels, and perhaps Arjan Brussee (programmer of Jazz Jackrabbit) would contribute to the coding"

The ideas were proving hard to see to fruition because of the limited resources they had at their disposal. He are some thoughts about these hardships from Cliffy B.

"The character was textured initially with the graphic from the Epic Pinball "Android". James always had that "cool airbrushed" style. He was using Painter when everyone else was still using Deluxepaint!"

All this happened around late 1994 and as the year wound down and ran into early 1995 when James remembers the following.

"The ideas for Unreal varied a huge amount in the first year. The very first idea was that it would be a mech style game with a deformable terrain. I had two terrains, one below and one overhead and they met in the middle so it looks like a cave. You could blast a rocket into a wall and start digging your own tunnel. Then I threw around the idea that it would be a vampire type game and then a fantasy dungeons and dragons style action game. That was in those early screen shots where you saw that red dragon. Then I finally made it futuristic sci-fi. That was best at the time because it allowed us to create a variety of really cool visual environments and gave us more flexibility in our designs."

It is in the middle of that year that Tim begins work on what would be the Unreal Editor.

"I wrote a Visual Basic editor front-end, and then a little C rendering engine. At first it was just a wireframe view. The very first thing I got working in UnrealEd was the blue background grid, which is still a visible part of the third-generation Unreal engine's editor. By the time the editor was up and running, James had built so many impressive models and textures that the plan changed a bit, and I ended up with responsibility for writing the renderer."

By late 1995, the renderer was finally ahead of the state of the art games. Remember that these were pre-Quake 1 days. With a pretty cool dynamic lighting system based on tile subdivision, the engine was definitely ahead of its time. The following screenshot is taken from one of the original Unreal Tech Demo builds (circa 1995).


Tim describes the shot...

"The default level is a test level I built. By this point, Unreal had gone from a sort of research project to the game we were betting the company on and investing all of our old shareware revenue into."

Now I actually had a chance to look at this original Tech Demo and I have to tell you that the lighting still looks great and this tech is almost 10 years old!

This brings us to 1996 which would become a very important year for Epic and the Unreal Engine. Once again Tim's thoughts.

"That year we got colored lighting in using my MMX-based software renderer, which Erik de Neve later optimized. That's when the visual style of the game took shape."

This was also the year that Unreal is signed to then big name publisher, GT Interactive.

While the basic building blocks of what would be Unreal were taking place but the gameplay didn't take shape until 1997 when Epic took interest in and hired a programmer named Steve Polge Steve had made a name for himself by inteventing the much maligned 'Reapor Bot' for Quake 1. Now with the team almost all in place the next phase of work begins. The winds of gaming are about to change.

To Be Continued...