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Epic Games

From a shareware smiley face to Unreal and Fortnite

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Tim Sweeney started the company in Potomac, Maryland, in 1991 to sell his shareware game ZZT. As Epic MegaGames it published Jill of the Jungle, Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall; as Epic Games, based in North Carolina from 1998, it made Unreal and licensed its engine across the industry, then built Gears of War, Fortnite and the Epic Games Store, and took Apple to court over the App Store.

In January 1995 Amiga World described a small group of Amiga programmers in South Carolina by what they hoped to become: “to the Amiga shareware game market what Apogee and Epic MegaGames are to the IBM”. Epic was then a shareware publisher in Potomac, Maryland, with a British office in a Bedfordshire village. It gave away the first part of each game and sold the rest by post and telephone. Three years later it released Unreal, and within a year other studios were building their games on its engine. In 2017 it released Fortnite.

The same man ran it throughout. Tim Sweeney wrote Epic’s first game, much of Unreal’s engine, and was still in charge when Epic sued Apple.

Fast facts

  • Founded: 1991 by Tim Sweeney, as Potomac Computer Systems of Potomac, Maryland.
  • Names: Epic MegaGames by January 1993; Epic Games from 1999.
  • Based: Potomac, Maryland; from 1998 North Carolina, first Raleigh and now Cary.
  • Shareware games: ZZT, Jill of the Jungle, Castle of the Winds, Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit, One Must Fall.
  • Later games: Unreal (1998), Unreal Tournament (1999), Gears of War (2006), Fortnite (2017).
  • Technology: the Unreal Engine, licensed to other developers from the late 1990s.
  • Store: the Epic Games Store, opened December 2018.

ZZT and a bigger-sounding name

Sweeney’s first game, ZZT, came out in 1991. Computer Gaming World found it “truly charming” and listed it at $14.95 from Potomac Computer Systems, a name he had chosen when he planned to go into computer consulting. It sold three or four copies a day, he recalled in 2009, and the registrations paid for his second game, Jill of the Jungle. He also renamed the company Epic MegaGames, “kind of a scam to make it look like we were a big company”, in his words.

By January 1993 Computer Gaming World’s shareware column was recommending two Epic MegaGames releases, Jill of the Jungle and Castle of the Winds, a Windows role-playing game inspired by Norse mythology. Sweeney wrote later that Jill “put Epic MegaGames on the map” and helped bring in other developers. The games that followed came mostly from them. James Schmalz wrote Epic Pinball, whose tables Epic’s advertising promised had “realistically fluid ball movement” and “ultra-smooth scrolling”. Jazz Jackrabbit (1994), a high-speed platform game about a rabbit “with a big gun on a mission to kick some turtle tail”, was the work of Cliff Bleszinski and its lead programmer, Arjan Brussee, a Dutch programmer whose 1991 demo Vectordemo had caught Sweeney’s attention; Edge later traced the Dutch studio Guerrilla Games back to Brussee’s work with Epic.

How Epic sold shareware

Epic worked the model Apogee had made famous: give away the first episode, sell the rest (see shareware). Sweeney later thanked Apogee’s Scott Miller for “early advice and encouragement”. The free episodes went out through bulletin boards, CompuServe (GO EPIC) and the internet. Registered Jazz Jackrabbit cost $25 for three episodes or $39 for all six, and players ordered by telephone from Epic MegaGames Inc. or, in Europe, from Epic MegaGames UK in Potton, Bedfordshire.

In November 1994 PC Gamer in Britain wrote that Epic had long been “plugging its ‘shareware is just another form of marketing’ idea”. It called Jazz Jackrabbit “probably the best platform game the PC has ever seen” and was even keener on Epic’s newest release, One Must Fall, a fighting game in which the two combatants “strap themselves into huge robot suits to duke it out”: “by far the best beat-’em-up ever to grace the PC”. The registered version cost £29.99.

Unreal

In January 1997 Edge previewed Epic’s first-person shooter. Unreal ran at 25 frames a second on a 133MHz Pentium without a 3D card, reflected water on its ceilings, cast shadows from swinging lights and creatures, and was, the magazine wrote, “incredibly, mostly the work of one programmer, Epic’s Tim Sweeney”. Its level editor was so easy to use, Edge reported, that Epic’s Mark Rein had built “a whole 3D town in less than ten minutes”. The same issue announced an alliance with the Scottish developer DMA Design, which was to convert the game for the Nintendo 64.

Unreal came out in 1998, created by Epic MegaGames “in collaboration with Digital Extremes” and published by GT Interactive. Edge gave it eight out of ten. It thought the game’s “biggest single achievement” was its artificial intelligence, with enemies that dodged, ducked behind corners and sometimes retreated, and it praised the lighting, the outdoor spaces and the two firing modes on every weapon. What held it back, the reviewer felt, was that it was “just too much like” the shooters it beat. Unreal shipped with its own level editor, and Edge singled out Epic’s “decision to give away complete level creation tools”. By August 1998 it was top of PC Zone’s charts.

Selling the engine

Epic’s second business turned out to matter as much as its games. In June 1999 Edge reported that the Unreal engine was “set to return in around ten upcoming games from various publishers”, among them Duke Nukem Forever, The Wheel of Time and Deus Ex. 3D Realms had moved Duke Nukem Forever onto it in 1998, and Ion Storm built Deus Ex on it for release in 2000. Mark Rein, who had worked at id Software and was now Epic’s vice president, ran the licensing. “Engines are just a set of paints, and game developers are painters,” he told Edge. “It’s what they do with the paint that determines the outcome.” He invited licensees to visit “our offices in Raleigh, North Carolina”, where Epic had moved from Maryland; Jay Wilbur, id’s former chief executive, had joined as well.

In 1999 the company became Epic Games. Computer Gaming World credited its next game, Unreal Tournament, to “Epic Games” that July; the game, a multiplayer shooter published by GT Interactive, came out later that year. Epic was also a founding member of Gathering of Developers, a publishing co-operative of independent studios.

The engine kept being rebuilt. In 2004 Sweeney, Rein and the level designer Alan Willard showed Edge Unreal Engine 3, and explained what he thought Epic did best: “we’ve always had a big focus on tools”. The editor, he said, showed “a pixel-accurate rendering of what you see in the game. It’s a WYSIWYG editing environment, always has been.” He counted the progress since “the first game I programmed 12 years ago” as a factor of 10,000.

Gears of War and the first Fortnite

Gears of War, the work of a team led by Bleszinski and published by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 in 2006, was built, Edge wrote, for “two very simple, very sound reasons. One, as a showcase for the potential of Unreal Engine 3 and two, to demonstrate the power of 360 one year in. And it amply achieves them both.”

In 2012 the Chinese company Tencent bought about 40 per cent of Epic for $330 million. The same year Edge previewed the first game on Unreal Engine 4, Fortnite. It was then a co-operative game in which players scavenged by day and built forts to survive monsters by night, drawn in a bright, cartoon style that Bleszinski, by then described as Epic’s former design director, wanted kept “light”. In 2014 Epic began renting Unreal Engine 4 to anyone for $19 a month, with its full C++ source code on GitHub, and in March 2015 it made the engine free to download, taking 5 per cent of a game’s gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product each quarter.

Fortnite

Fortnite reached players in 2017: first the co-operative Save the World, in paid early access that July, then in September a free-to-play Battle Royale mode, in which players fight to be the last one standing. Wireframe traced the battle royale idea to player-made modifications of Minecraft and DayZ (see modding). By 2020 Epic said it had more than 25 million daily players, and more than 12 million logged in to watch the rapper Travis Scott perform a concert inside the game.

The store and the courts

Epic opened the Epic Games Store for PC games in December 2018. It took 12 per cent of each sale, against the 30 per cent usual on other stores, and waived its engine royalty on Unreal games sold there. It drew players in with free games every week and drew criticism for paying publishers to keep games off Valve’s Steam for a time. Court documents later showed that Epic had spent $11.6 million on the free games in their first nine months, and that its store had about 20.7 million users by September 2019.

Those documents came from Epic’s dispute with Apple. In August 2020 Epic added its own payment option to Fortnite on the iPhone, bypassing Apple’s; Apple removed the game from its App Store the same day, and Epic sued. In September 2021 Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found for Apple on nine of Epic’s ten claims, rejecting the argument that Apple held an illegal monopoly, but ruled that its “anti-steering” rules, which stopped developers telling players about cheaper ways to pay, broke California law, and ordered Apple to allow them. In April 2025 she found that Apple had “willfully” failed to comply and referred the company for possible criminal contempt proceedings. Fortnite returned to the American App Store in May 2025. In June 2026 the US Supreme Court agreed to hear Apple’s appeal against the contempt finding.

The company kept growing and shrinking. Disney announced a $1.5 billion investment in Epic in February 2024. In September 2023 Sweeney announced that Epic was laying off 870 people, about 16 per cent of its staff, and in March 2026 it cut more than 1,000 jobs as Fortnite’s popularity slowed.

Released source code

Epic’s engine source has been available since March 2014 to anyone who accepts the Unreal Engine licence, through Epic’s repositories on GitHub. It is licensed source, not open source: using the engine commercially carries a royalty. The source of Epic’s first game, ZZT, was lost; Adrian Siekierka’s byte-exact reconstruction of it was published in 2020 under the MIT licence with Epic’s permission (see ZZT).

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