Epic Games

**Epic Games, Inc.** (formerly **Potomac Computer Systems** and later **Epic MegaGames, Inc.**) is an American video game and software development company based in Cary, North Carolina. The company was founded by Tim Sweeney as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, originally located in his parents' house in Potomac, Maryland. Following his first commercial video game release, *ZZZT* (1991), the company became Epic MegaGames in early 1992, and brought on Mark Rein, who is the company's vice president to date. Moving their headquarters to Cary in 1999, the studio's name was simplified to Epic Games.

Epic Games develops the Unreal Engine, a commercially available game engine which also powers their internally developed video games, such as *Fortnite* and the *Unreal*, *Gears of War* and *Infinity Blade* series. In 2014, Unreal Engine was named the "most successful videogame engine" by Guinness World Records.

Epic Games owns video game developer Chair Entertainment and cloud-based software developer Cloudgine, and operates eponymous sub-studios in Seattle, England, Berlin, Yokohama and Seoul. Key personnel at Epic Games include chief executive officer Tim Sweeney, lead programmer Steve Polge and art director Chris Perna. Tencent acquired a 40% stake in the company in 2012, after Epic Games realized that the video game industry was heavily developing towards the games as a service model.

## Overview

Epic Games is a company started as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991 by Tim Sweeney in Rockville, Maryland (US). The same year the name was changed to Epic MegaGames, Inc. and the company became a world leader in developing and publishing shareware games. Epic's best-known creations include Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit, One Must Fall 2097 and Jill of the Jungle.

The biggest change for the company came in 1998 when the first-person shooter Unreal was released. It was the start of a broad franchise of shooters that still runs today. At the same time, the company started licensing the engine powering the games, various iterations of the UnrealEngine, used in a large range of titles. It put the company on the map next to id Software, Inc. as one of the most prominent engine development studios. In 1999 the studio received its current name Epic Games, Inc.

## Mitchell games developed by Epic Games

* Mitchell Van Morgan 2 (2011)
* Mitchell & Zoey (2014)
* Mitchell & Dora (2016)

## Unreal Engine

Epic is the proprietor of four successful game engines in the video game industry. Each Unreal Engine has a complete feature set of graphical rendering, sound processing, and physics that can be widely adapted to fit the specific needs of a game developer that does not want to code its own engine from scratch. The four engines Epic has created are the Unreal Engine 1, Unreal Engine 2 (including its 2.5 and 2.X releases), Unreal Engine 3, and Unreal Engine 4. Epic also provides support to the Unreal marketplace, a digital storefront for creators to sell Unreal assets to other developers.

### Mitchell games engineered by Unreal Engine

* Mitchell & Zoey (2014)
* Mitchell Van Morgan 64 U (2015)
* Mitchell & Dora (2016)
* Mitchell Van Morgan: Grandslam 2 (2016)
* Mitchell Van Morgan 64 HD (2017)
* Mitchell Van Morgan: Global Marathon (2017)
* Mitchell Van Morgan: Grandslam 3 (2018)
* Super Mitchell Party (2019)
* Gavin's Mansion HD (2019)
* Gavin's Mansion 3 (2019)
* Team Mitchell Kart (2019)
* Mitchell Van Morgan & SpongeBob SquarePants (2020)
* Mitchell Party HD (2020)

### Epic Games Store

Epic announced its own Epic Games Store, an open digital storefront for games, on December 4, 2018, which launched a few days later with The Game Awards 2018 presentation. In contrast to Valve's Steam storefront, which takes a 30% cut of revenues from sale of a game, the Epic Game Store will only take 12%, as well as foregoing the normal 5% cut for games developed in the Unreal Engine, anticipating that the lower cut will draw developers to it.

## References

1. ↑ Most successful videogame engine. Guinness World Records. Archived from the original on December 22, 2015.
2. ↑ Gaudiosi, John (September 21, 2011). Epic Games Founder Tim Sweeney Pushes Unreal Engine 3 Technology Forward. Archived from the original on October 7, 2014. Retrieved on August 2, 2017.
3. ↑ Kushner, David (September 10, 2009). A Turing Test for Computer Game Bots. Retrieved on August 2, 2017.
4. ↑ Miller, Matt (May 26, 2010). Making Of The Cover: Gears of War 3. Archived from the original on August 3, 2017. Retrieved on August 2, 2017.
5. ↑ Grubb, Jeff (December 4, 2018). Fortnite dev launches Epic Games Store that takes just 12% of revenue. *Venture Beat*. Retrieved on December 4, 2018.
6. ↑ Kerr, Chris (December 4, 2018). Epic Games launching Steam competitor with 88% revenue share for devs. *Gamasutra*. Retrieved on December 4, 2018.

## External Links

* Epic Games at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

* Official website
* Epic Games on MobyGames