Epic Games

Epic Games, Inc. (formerly Potomac Computer Systems and later Epic MegaGames, Inc.) is an American video game and software development corporation 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, ZZT (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.

Potomac Computer Systems (1991–1992)
Potomac Computer Systems was founded by Tim Sweeney in 1991. At the time, Sweeney was studying mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland. Though he lived in a dorm located in Potomac, Maryland, he frequently visited his parents, who lived in the same town, where his personal computer, used for both work and leisure, was situated. Out of this location, Sweeney started Potomac Computer Systems as a computer consulting business, but later figured that it would be too much work he would have to put into keeping the business stable, and scrapped the idea.

After finishing his game ZZT in October 1991, Sweeney opted to re-use the Potomac Computer Systems name to release the game to the public. It was only with the unexpected 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 turning Potomac Computer Systems into a video game company. ZZT was sold through bulletin board systems, while all orders were fulfilled by Sweeney's father, Paul Sweeney. The game sold several thousand copies as of May 2009, and Paul Sweeney still lived at the former Potomac Computer Systems address at the time, fulfilling all orders that eventually came by mail. The final copy of ZZT was shipped by Paul Sweeney in November 2013.

Epic MegaGames (1992–1999)
In early 1992, Sweeney found himself and his new-found video game company in a business where larger studios, such as Apogee Software and id Software, were dominant, and he had to find a more serious name for his. As such, Sweeney came up with "Epic MegaGames", a name which incorporated "Epic" and "Mega" to make it sound like it represented a fairly large company (such as Apogee Software), although he was its only employee. Sweeney soon underwent searching for a business partner, and eventually caught up with Mark Rein, who previously quit his job at id Software and moved to Toronto, Ontario. Rein worked remotely from Toronto, and primarily handled sales, marketing and publishing deals; business development that Sweeney found to have significantly contributed to the company's growth. Some time this season, the company soon had 20 employees consisting of programmers, artists, designers and composers. The following year, they had over 30 employees.

In 1996, Epic MegaGames produced a shareware isometric shooter called Fire Fight, developed by Polish studio Chaos Works. It was published by Electronic Arts. A year later, Safari Software was acquired in whole by Epic MegaGames and some of their titles as well as other pre-1998 games were sold under the Epic Classics brand until late 2012. By 1997, Epic MegaGames had 50 people working for them worldwide. In 1998, Epic MegaGames released Unreal, a 3D first-person shooter co-developed with Digital Extremes, which expanded into a series of Unreal games. The company also began to license the core technology, the Unreal Engine, to other game developers.

Epic Games (1999–present)
In February 1999, Epic MegaGames announced that they had moved their headquarters to a new location in Cary, North Carolina, and would henceforth be known as simply Epic Games. Rein explained that "Unreal was first created by developers who were scattered across the world, eventually, the team came together to finish the game and that's when the real magic started. The move to North Carolina centralizes Epic, bringing all of the company's talented developers under one roof." Furthermore, Sweeney stated that the "Mega" part of the name was dropped because they no longer wanted to pretend to be a big company, as was the original intention of the name when it was a one-man team. The follow-up game, Unreal Tournament, shipped to critical acclaim the same year, at which point the studio had 13 employees.

The company launched the Make Something Unreal competition in 2004, aiming to reward video game developers who create mods using the Unreal game engine. Tripwire Interactive won US$80,000 in cash and computer hardware prizes over the course of the contest in the first contest in 2004. In 2006, Epic released the Xbox 360 shooter Gears of War, which became a commercial success for the company, grossing about $100 million. A year later, the company released Unreal Tournament 3 for PC and acquired a majority share in People Can Fly.

In 2008, Epic Games acquired Utah based Chair Entertainment and released Gears of War 2, selling over three million copies within the first month of its release. Summer 2009 saw the launch of Chair Entertainment's Shadow Complex, an adventure game inspired by the Metroid series.

Epic Games released on September 1, 2010 Epic Citadel as a tech demo to demonstrate the Unreal Engine 3 running on Apple iOS, within Adobe Flash Player Stage3D and using HTML5 WebGL technologies. It was also released for Android on January 29, 2013. Epic Games worked on an iOS game, Infinity Blade, which was released on December 9, 2010. The third game in the series, Gears of War 3, came out in 2011.

In 2011, Epic's subsidiary Titan Studios was dissolved. At the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, Epic Games announced their new game Fortnite.

In June 2012, Epic announced that it is opening up a new studio, Epic Baltimore, made up of members of 38 Studios' Big Huge Games. Epic Baltimore was renamed to Impossible Studios in August 2012. However, the studio ended up closing its doors in February 2013.

Around 2012, Epic Games observed that the video game industry was shifting to a games as a service model. Lacking experience, they made an agreement with the Chinese company Tencent Holdings, who had several games under their banner (including Riot Games' League of Legends) operating successfully as games as a service. In exchange for Tencent's help, Tencent acquired approximately 48.4% of Epic then issued share capital, equating to 40 percent of total Epic — inclusive of both stock and employee stock options, for $330 million in June 2012. Tencent Holdings has the right to nominate directors to the board of Epic Games and thus counts as an associate of the Group. A number of high-profile staff left the company months after the deal was announced. In October 2012, Cliff Bleszinski, then the design director, announced he was leaving Epic Games after 20 years with the company. His official reason was "It's time for a much needed break". Later in December 2012, Epic Games president Mike Capps announced his retirement and cited the reasons as the arrival of a baby boy he was having with his wife and his plans to be a stay-at-home dad. He subsequently announced his departure of his advisory role as well as his affiliation with the company in March 2013.

On January 27, 2014, Microsoft acquired the Gears of War IP from Epic Games. The first game since the acquisition, Gears of War 4, was released by The Coalition in October 2016, taking over the development duties from Epic.

On May 8, 2014, Epic Games announced a new Unreal Tournament title. The game will be free, open to modding, and essentially developed alongside fans.

In June 2015, Epic Games Poland reverted to People Can Fly Sp. z o.o. after Epic Games sold its share in the Polish studio. The Bulletstorm IP was retained by People Can Fly who has since launched a remastered version called Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition on April 7, 2017, published by Gearbox Software. On November 4, 2015, Epic Games announced a new third-person multiplayer online battle arena game called Paragon. The game was slated for release in 2016, for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4, with playable characters expected to be unveiled gradually throughout November, however was cancelled in January 2018. A month later, Shadow Complex Remastered was launched for free on PC, with console versions being released in early 2016. A physical version of the remaster was available for PS4 in August 2016.

Early 2017 saw the release of Robo Recall, the company's first game for virtual reality, on the Oculus Rift. The game received an 8.5 out of 10 rating from IGN. On July 25, Fortnite entered paid early access, with a full free-to-play release expected in 2018.

In January 2018, it was announced that Epic had acquired Cloudgine, a developer of cloud-based gaming software.

Technology
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.

Litigation
On July 19, 2007, Canadian game studio Silicon Knights sued Epic Games for failure to "provide a working game engine", causing the Ontario-based game developer to "experience considerable losses." The suit alleged that Epic Games was "sabotaging" Unreal Engine 3 licensees. Epic's licensing document stated that a working version of the engine would be available within six months of the Xbox 360 developer kits being released. Silicon Knights claimed that Epic not only missed this deadline, but that when a working version of the engine was eventually released, the documentation was insufficient. The game studio also claimed Epic had withheld vital improvements to the game engine, claiming they were "game specific", while also using licensing fees to fund development of its own titles rather than the engine itself.

In August 2007, Epic Games counter-sued Silicon Knights, alleging the studio was aware when it signed on that certain features of Unreal Engine 3 were still in development and that components would continue to be developed and added as Epic completed work on Gears of War. Therefore, in a statement, Epic said that "SK knew when it committed to the licensing agreement that Unreal Engine 3 may not meet its requirements and may not be modified to meet them." Additionally, the counter-suit claimed that Silicon Knights had "made unauthorized use of Epic's Licensed Technology" and had "infringed and otherwise violated Epic's intellectual property rights, including Epic's copyrighted works, trade secrets, know how and confidential information" by incorporating Unreal Engine 3 code into its own engine, the "Silicon Knights Engine." Furthermore, Epic claimed the Canadian developer broke the contract by employing this derivative work in an internal title and a second game with Sega, a partnership for which it never received a license fee.

On May 30, 2012, Epic Games defeated Silicon Knights' lawsuit, and won its counter-suit for $4.45 million on grounds of copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and breach of contract, an injury award that was later doubled due to prejudgment interest, attorneys' fees and costs. Consistent with Epic's counterclaims, the presiding judge, James C. Dever III, stated that Silicon Knights had "deliberately and repeatedly copied thousands of lines of Epic Games' copyrighted code, and then attempted to conceal its wrongdoing by removing Epic Games' copyright notices and by disguising Epic Games' copyrighted code as Silicon Knights' own." Evidence against Silicon Knights was "overwhelming", said Dever, as it not only copied functional code but also "non-functional, internal comments Epic Games' programmers had left for themselves."

As a result, on November 7, 2012, Silicon Knights was directed by the court to destroy all game code derived from Unreal Engine 3, all information from licensee-restricted areas of Epic's Unreal Engine documentation website, and to permit Epic Games access to the company's servers and other devices to ensure these items have been removed. In addition, the studio was instructed to recall and destroy all unsold retail copies of games built with Unreal Engine 3 code, including Too Human, X-Men Destiny, The Sandman, The Box/Ritualyst, and Siren in the Maelstrom (the latter three titles were projects never released, or even officially announced).

On May 16, 2014, following the loss of the court case, Silicon Knights filed for bankruptcy and a Certificate of Appointment was issued by the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, with Collins Barrow Toronto Limited being appointed as Trustee in Bankruptcy.

Subsidiaries and divisions

 * Chair Entertainment in Salt Lake City, Utah; established in 2005, acquired in 2008.
 * Cloudgine in Edinburgh, Scotland; established in 2012, acquired in 2018.
 * Epic Games Germany GmbH (doing business as Epic Games Berlin) in Berlin, Germany; established in 2016.
 * Epic Games Korea in Seoul, South Korea; established in 2009.
 * Epic Games Japan in Yokohama, Japan; established in 2010.
 * Epic Games Seattle in Seattle, Washington, U.S.; opened in 2012.
 * Epic Games UK in Guildford, Sunderland and Leamington Spa, England; formed in 2014 upon the acquisition of Pitbull Studio, which was founded in 2010.