Epic's Mark Rein

The effervescent middleware man on Unreal's future, and why mobile is increasingly important

Feature by Alec Meer Contributor

Published on July 5, 2010

GamesIndustry.biz Is Bulletstorm quite calculated in that regard, to prove that you're whoever you want to be on whatever platform you want to be on?

Mark Rein

No - but it does demonstrate our strength on all platforms. You can't make games with an agenda. You can make tech demos with an agenda - you've seen what I was showing up there [at GameHorizon], our tech demo on iPad and iPhone and with Google's Android device. We have an agenda to demonstrate a technology on that.

But games you have to make out of a pure passion. I think people who make games to try to check off an itch or something like that, customers see through that. They want passion, they want a game you really love to play. So I think anytime we make a game it's because we love that game.

My point is that Bulletstorm is going to be a great game on three platforms, and demonstrate that. Unreal Tournament was a great game on three platforms.

GamesIndustry.biz You've got this evident personal enthusiasm for games you want to make on these mobile platforms, but is this just fooling around or is it endemic of a real push on Epic's part?

Mark Rein

We're going to make a game for mobile and tablet. We haven't announced anything yet, but it's due.

GamesIndustry.biz Is this something of a change in development philosophy for you? Historically you've been pushing the Unreal engine forwards, forwards, forwards, but now you have to go backwards, to some extent, to work on a much lower-spec platform.

Mark Rein

Actually that's the thing, we're not going backwards at all. This technology, Unreal Engine 3 - first of all it's the same engine. Unreal Engine 3 on iPhone uses the exact same pipeline and process and what I'm fond of telling people is you can preserve the 'three Ps' - your people, your pipeline and your process, and when moving from using Unreal Engine 3 to make an Xbox 360 or PC game or a PS3 to making one for the iPhone.

Yeah, the hardware spec is different in the same way you can have a high-end PC or a low-end PC or a mid-range PC. But the people that you have that are trained and know how to use this technology, the pipeline for getting content to it and the process for creating content is the same. That's 100 per cent preserved.

GamesIndustry.biz Do you think that people haven't noticed where this is going, that in spite of all this talk of the current console model being dinosaurs, you guys might end up way ahead because a lot of your peers are clinging to the old ways?

Mark Rein

I think that's something that we've always been really good at, is kind of reinventing ourselves as new technology comes out. You've seen we're on our third generation of Unreal Engine technology, and I think every time we try to predict what that next piece of technology's going to be, and how we fit in on it, and how we port to be ready when it shows up... I think we've just done a good job there.

The nice thing is people don't have to worry about this, they don't have to keep on building new engines every generation, they can just license technology. And we're not the only ones. There are other middleware developers. I think that as the platform changes more and more, there's just a better opportunity for middleware to be involved.

GamesIndustry.biz I notice you keep saying "middleware", while others are careful to say "engine" - as if middleware's a dirty word. Is that something you've always done, or endemic of a change in perception?

Mark Rein

Well, we make a game engine - that's our middleware. Our middleware is a game engine, but not everybody's going to like the game engine. There are lots of different kinds of middleware you can license, you can Frankenstein up your own game engine just by buying lots of different pieces of middleware. And in fact we have at least 15 or 20 companies in our independent partners programme which our middleware which works with our game engine.

There are lots of different ways to build games - you don't have to buy just an engine like ours, you can buy APIs and SDKs and you can buy pieces and interchange them… But we make middleware. I doubt there are many games that don't use any middleware, at least in terms of high-end triple-A stuff. Certainly you can build a game with no middleware, but, I don't know.. is your compiler middleware? Is the platform providing middleware?