UNREAL TOUR
Once or twice a decade we get one of my favorite treats: a new game engine tech demo. These are not actual games. They’re better: They’re promises of what games could be, pure spectacle showcases for the majesty of a million more polygons on screen and bumpy tessellated surfaces and lifelike ray-traced lighting. Tech demos are raw power and unhinged artistry mashed together, gleefully disregarding pesky problems like ‘writing’ and ‘design’ that have to go into proper videogames.
Maybe the best of them was 2011’s Unreal Engine 3 Samaritan demo, a three minute slice of gritty sci-fi in 2021 turned out to be). In 2005 Square Enix created a tech demo of for the PlayStation 3 that ended up haunting the company for years until it finally
