According to an interview, Sweeney wrote 90 percent of the code in the engine, including the graphics, tools, and networking system. After years in development, it debuted with the game's release in 1998, although MicroProse and Legend Entertainment had access to the technology much earlier, licensing it in 1996.

Having created editing tools for his shareware games ZZT (1991) and Jill of the Jungle (1992), Sweeney began writing the engine in 1995 for the production of a game that would later become a first-person shooter known as Unreal. The first-generation Unreal Engine was developed by Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games. History First generation A screenshot released by Epic of the first version of UnrealEd, displaying a graphical user interface written in Visual Basic

In 2014, Unreal Engine was named the world's 'most successful videogame engine' by Guinness World Records. Epic has included features from acquired companies like Quixel in the engine, which is seen as helped by Fortnite's revenue. Epic waives their royalties margin for games until developers have earned US$1 million in revenue and the fee is waived if developers publish on the Epic Games Store. Its source code is available on GitHub, and commercial use is granted based on a royalty model.

The latest generation, Unreal Engine 5, was launched in April 2022. Unreal Engine is written in C++ and features a high degree of portability, supporting a wide range of desktop, mobile, console, and virtual reality platforms. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in a variety of genres of games and has seen adoption by other industries, most notably the film and television industry. Unreal Engine ( UE) is a series of 3D computer graphics game engines developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter video game Unreal. Source-available commercial software with royalty model for commercial use

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