The story begins in the early 1980s with a young boy by the name of Tim Sweeney. Having hit double digits, Sweeney began his love affair with programming, reportedly clocking up over 10,000 hours before the age of 15. This devotion steered him down the games route, leading to him creating editing tools for shareware games in the early 1990s, but it took until 1995 for Sweeney to begin writing the code for what he is now famous for: Unreal Engine (UE).
UE's first game, , hit the shelves in 1998: a first-person shooter game for the PC. In those early years UE went head to head with the Quake Engine, developed by id Software. Years of fierce competition has pushed the gaming industry forward at unparalleled speeds, and decades after Sweeney's first attempt, UE looks very different. Underneath the interface there is a powerhouse of code that is now enabling developers to create next-gen games. Epic Games states that 48 per cent of next-gen games are now made using its engine; that's quite the market share, and just
