Epic Games began as a one-man company pretending to be big
In 1991 Tim Sweeney, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Maryland, released a shareware game called ZZT from his parents' house in Potomac. His father packed the mail orders, and kept doing so until he shipped the last copy in November 2013. That bedroom venture became Epic Games.
ZZT's surprise success came largely from how easily players could modify it with Sweeney's own scripting language. Competing with giants such as id Software and Apogee in 1992, he renamed his outfit Epic MegaGames because the words made it sound large, though he was its only employee. He soon recruited Mark Rein, who ran sales and publishing deals from Toronto, and a 17-year-old Cliff Bleszinski, who had sent in a game of his own.
The breakthrough was Unreal in 1998, a 3D shooter whose engine Epic began licensing to other studios. When the company moved to Cary, North Carolina, in 1999, it dropped the Mega, no longer wishing to pose as a big firm. As PC piracy made single-player games harder to sell, Epic turned to consoles: Gears of War for the Xbox 360 grossed about $100 million on a $12 million budget in 2006.
Chafing under publishers' demands, Epic sold Tencent a 40% stake of the whole company for $330 million in 2012 to learn the games-as-a-service model. Several veterans left soon after, including Bleszinski after 20 years and Gears lead Rod Fergusson, who wanted to keep making big story-driven games; Microsoft bought the Gears rights in 2014.
The gamble paid off with Fortnite Battle Royale in 2017, whose money financed the Epic Games Store and more Unreal Engine development. Guinness World Records had already named Unreal the most successful videogame engine in 2014. By April 2022 Epic was valued at US$32 billion, with Sweeney still the controlling shareholder.
Source: Epic Games
