Timothy D. Sweeney is an American computer game programmer known as the founder of Epic Games, an American video game and software development company.
Early life and education
Timothy D. Sweeney was born in 1970 and grew up in a little town called Potomac in Maryland. Sweeney is a son to a father with a classified government job, where he worked for the Defense Mapping Agency creating maps from satellite, and a mother who worked in a flower shop.
Sweeney attended the University of Maryland, majoring in Mechanical Engineering starting around 1989, though still fascinated by computers. Around this time Sweeney’s father gave him an IBM personal computer.
Career
Tim Sweeney founded Potomac Computer Systems in 1991. Sweeney was studying mechanical engineering at that time, at the University of Maryland. Though Sweeney lived in a dorm resided in Potomac, Maryland, he regularly visited his parents, who lived in the same town, where he placed his computer. Sweeney began Potomac Computer Systems as a computer consulting business but later decided that keeping the business stable and scrapped the idea would consume too much effort.
In October 1991, in order to publish the game to the public, Sweeney opted to reuse the Potomac Computer Systems after completing ZZT.
Sweeney chose to reuse Potomac Computer Systems in October 1991, after completing ZZT to publish the game to the public. It was only with the surprising success of ZZT, caused in most part by the easy modifiability of the game using Sweeney’s custom ZZT-oop programming language that made Sweeney consider shifting Potomac Computer Systems into a video game company. ZZT was marketed through bulletin board systems, while all requests were accomplished by Sweeney’s father, Paul Sweeney. As of May 2009, the game sold several thousand copies, and Paul Sweeney still lived at the former Potomac Computer Systems address at the time, fulfilling all orders that ultimately came by mail. Paul Sweeney shipped his final copy of ZZT in November 2013.
Epic MegaGames
Sweeney spotted himself and his new-found video game company in business in early 1992, where larger studios such as id Software and Apogee Software were powerful; he had to come up with a more serious name for his. Sweeney came up with Epic MegaGames, a name which merged Epic and Mega to make it sound like it signified a fairly large company (such as Apogee Software), although he was its only employee. Sweeney soon underwent seeking for a business associate, and eventually caught up with Mark Rein, who previously resigned his job at id Software and transferred to Toronto, Ontario. Rein worked remotely from Toronto and primarily ran sales, marketing and publishing deals; business development that Sweeney found to have significantly added to the company’s growth. Sometime this season, the company soon had 20 employees consisting of artists, composers, designers, and programmers. Among them was Cliff Bleszinski, the 17-year old who joined the company after submitting his game Dare to Dream to Sweeney. The following year, they had more than 30 employees.
Epic MegaGames designed a shareware isometric shooter called the Fire Fight in 1996, developed by Polish studio Chaos Works. The Electronic Arts issued Fire Fight. By 1997, Epic MegaGames had 50 persons working for the company worldwide. Epic MegaGames published a 3D first-person shooter co-developed with Digital Extremes called Unreal in 1998, which grew into a series of Unreal games. Epic MegaGames also began to license Unreal Engine, the core technology to other game developers.
Epic MegaGames declared in February 1999 that they had relocated their headquarters to a new location in Cary, North Carolina, and would henceforth be identified as simply Epic Games. Rein clarified that Unreal was first built by developers who were spread across the world, eventually, the team came together to complete the game, and that’s when the real magic began. The relocation to North Carolina centralizes Epic producing all of the company’s skilled developers under one roof. Sweeney said that the Mega part of the title was omitted because they no longer wanted to assume to be a big company, as was the first intention of the name when it was a one-man team. The follow-up game, Unreal Tournament, directed to critical acclaim, the same year at which point the workroom had 13 employees.
In 2004, the company began the Make Something Unreal competition, aiming to reward video game developers who design mods using the Unreal game engine. Over the course of the contest in the first contest in 2004, Tripwire Interactive won computer hardware prizes and $80,000 in cash.
Video Games
Epic Games is recognized for games such as ZZT developed by founder Tim Sweeney, various shareware titles including Epic Pinball and Jazz Jackrabbit, the Unreal video game series, which is used as a showcase for its Unreal Engine, the Gears of War series which is now owned by The Coalition and Microsoft Game Studios, Bulletstorm, Fortnite, Infinity Blade, and Shadow Complex.
Unreal Engine
Epic is the owner of four successful game engines in the video game industry. Each Unreal Engine has a perfect feature set of sound processing, graphical rendering, and physics that can be widely used to fit the particular needs of game developers who do not want to code its own engine from scratch. The four engines Epic has designed 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 gives support to the Unreal marketplace, a digital storefront for creators to sell Unreal assets to other developers.
As of 2019, Bloomberg announced that Tim Sweeney has a net worth of $7.21 billion.