How do you put the right teams together? How do you find the people that you really want?

We hire people very slowly. Once in a while we look for somebody for a specific position, but often it takes six months before we find the right guy. Most of the people we hire aren't "Okay, we need a level designer. Let's post 'help wanted' ads, and look at the level designer resumes that we get." Mostly it's waiting around for six months, or eight months, and looking at all the level designers releasing stuff on the Internet, and picking the best one. When we see someone who is clearly way better than everybody else, we go after them really aggressively. I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's possible to hire extremely high quality people as long as you don't try to grow really fast, and as long as you're a fun, attractive company to work at. At Epic, we can pay people really well now, but even when we didn't have a successful game under our belt, and we weren't paying huge salaries or anything, we were able to attract really good people. We have a good team to work with, really well balanced developers, and the game is developed by developers - it's not controlled or dictated by marketing people or business people who are out of touch. Developers like that.

Do you think that the best games are always going to come from the smaller companies that aren't controlled by the publishers?

At least in the United States those are really the only teams who are able to create great games time after time again. It's either by having a small team that's focused and does a great job, or by having a huge team and just investing and enormous amount of money into development. If you have an 80 person team to develop a game and it's not a success, then you're guaranteed to lose money. Whereas with a 20 person team, if our game sells half of what we expect, then we're still not losing money on it, we're just not doing as well as we expected.

By making your engine so accessible to the public, do you feel that that you're increasing the amount of people who play your game or are you creating your own competition?

If we're creating our own competition… Great! We can only develop one game at a time, and that takes at least 18 months. Whereas when we work with other partners who are doing great stuff with our engine, you know, creating games like Deus Ex or Undying, those games we can really be proud of. Even though we don't develop them, we contributed to them, and we're making some money from those projects. I think that's a good way for a company like us, you know, a small focused team, to be able to do more stuff without growing big. There's always the ever-present threat, some new team that nobody's ever heard of, who's going to come along a make a game that blows us away. I think we always live in fear of that kind of scenario. We've been able to keep up so far, but we work really hard. It's not like we're resting on our laurels. We're all working the same 60-80 hours a week that we were working during Unreal One.

How do you come up with something new and innovative when so many people are creating first person shooters?

It's kind of a random thing. You always have to keep watch on what's possible with the technology, and graphics cards, and CPUs and everything. Every once in a while there is a major, fundamental change where something that was completely impractical before becomes possible. One was the switch to hardware rendering. That was a pretty obvious thing back then because everybody had so much notice. Now there's other changes too. With pixel shaders and vertex shaders, you can start doing completely accurate lining on all of your objects, and you have a whole bunch of new tradeoffs there. Most of that comes from just being flexible and being able to reinvent all of your assumptions about how you develop games every once in a while. Nowadays we're creating levels that are more than 100 times the polygon counts of Unreal Tournament levels. Our whole way of building objects and using tools has completely changed. You can no longer go through and build every little wall and floor in your entire game from scratch. You have to build big archives of different pieces of architecture, you know, doorframes, doorways, and spires, and things like that - build libraries and share them.

We're always looking at our productivity and seeing where are our bottlenecks and how can we fix them? So many companies are the master of one generation of technology or consoles or whatever. When the next generation comes along they just don't bother learning it, and they think that they can keep doing things the way they always did. It's easy to be the rebel when you're small because we can completely change direction without any big ramifications. Whenever we're ready, if we want to do something different, we can. If we wanted to make a game that's totally not a first person action game, no problem, we can do that. Six years ago, we were doing Jazz Jackrabbit, and Epic Pinball, and these 2D games. Now we're doing Unreal. What will we be doing six years from now? Well, who knows? Maybe it will be more Unreal style games, or maybe it will be completely different. I don't think that we've pigeonholed ourselves as one particular kind of game developer.

If you could make your perfect game, what would it be?

It's hard to say nowadays. I think that we're doing a pretty good job taking advantage of what the technology makes possible. Long term, there are some cool possibilities. There's this big trend towards massive multiplayer games. Of course now there's 60 teams developing massive multiplayer games, and three of them will be successful, you know, the cloning effect. The big problem with them is they look a lot like America Online, and Compuserve, and Prodigy looked like six years ago. They're totally closed systems run by some, you know… sorry, the "coolest" managers. They don't go in, and play the game, and talk to customers, and make sure they're keeping them happy. What seems really neat is to kind of take the Internet approach to that. You know, we're not going to have one central bureaucracy in charge of the thing, it's just going to be randomly distributed, and it's not going to work perfectly, but it's going to make up for it by giving everybody control to do their own thing and innovate with it. So, do a distributed massive multiplayer game where anybody can run a server, and anybody can add content to the game. I have no idea how to make that work from a gameplay point of view, but that kind of stuff sounds interesting. I don't think that closed system model that you see going with Everquest and Ultima Online, I don't think that's sustainable. I don't think those games will exist ten years from now. How are we going to make the transition? Who knows? Games, and programs, and information want to be inherently open and modifiable by users. So, you've got to get to a different system. It's hard to do also because, even first person shooters, there's not a big incentive to cheat because you just get some more frags maybe. Whereas with a massive multiplayer game, there's huge incentive to cheat. If you could cheat, you could be the most powerful person in the game, and have these huge advantages. So, you have to deal with these issues like "how to avoid cheating", and things like that. I think that we'll get there at some point. If you've seen the Freenet Project, basically, it's like Napster but with everything encrypted to the point where servers don't know what kind of information that they're sending back and forth through the network. Everybody has end to end communication, but with complete secrecy and complete lack of ability to hack the system. That kind of stuff could be applied to gaming at some point. That would be cool. I'd love to do something like that someday, but the chances are 20% that it will happen or 80% something else will happen in its place. Definitely games will get better.

What games do you play apart from Unreal?

I haven't played a lot recently; I played Undying most recently. That was very cool: very scary. Last game that really scared me when I was playing it, you know, go into your room, turn out all the lights, play the game, that was Doom, and that was very long ago. I guess some people say Unreal is scary, but when you're developing it and playing it every day, you just don't experience that. Undying really got that point across with the realistic shadows and the scary sequences.

It must be very gratifying to have put such hard work into something and have it become such a phenomenally popular product.

I guess. Some of the team members feel that way. Everything that I've done in the past, it doesn't matter because I'm working on something different now, and it's either going to be a big success or a big failure, and I don't want to screw it up. I really never have looked back. I was playing Unreal Tournament really heavily online for the first month of it shipping, and then I stopped. A lot of the guys still play it, but especially as the technology guy, I always have to be looking way ahead of the current thing towards the next thing.

Where do you get your inspiration?

It's a lot of random influences. If you go for a walk in the woods, and you look around, and you see the trees and the amount of detail there, you realize that we're still a factor of a hundred short of being able to render those kinds of scenes in real-time. So, looking at things that way, looking at real life and saying: "Okay, how far away are games from this kind of thing in terms of rendering, and behaviour, and realistic scenes, realistic lighting?" That's really interesting, to just look at that and figure out: "Okay, how can I get a rough approximation of this into the game that runs fast enough?" We play a lot of other games; most of the guys on the team are really hardcore gamers. I play other games, but I'm not that hardcore. You're much more likely to find me in the visual C++.

With Unreal One, I was in Canada, it was freezing cold, and I was walking along, and there was a heavy haze everywhere. There were these streetlights with big globes of fog illuminated around them. I was saying, "Hey! I could program that!" So, we had diametric fog as one of the big features of the Unreal One engine.