Timothy Dean Sweeney is an American video game programmer, businessman and conservationist. He's the founder and CEO of Epic Games, and the father of a little piece of software you may have heard about, called Unreal Engine, the most ubiquitous Game Engine that powered entire generations of videogames. Chances are, if you own a PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 or Xbox One, you may have possibly played a game that uses a generation of this engine.
Sweeney grew up in Maryland, where he started building go-karts. Programming games since an early age, Sweeney created Epic Megagames (initially known as Potomac Software) as a shareware company, while he was a student majoring in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland. Epic got its start when Sweeney created ZZT, the company's first game, in 1991. Sweeney credits this game's success with fueling the early growth of his company. However, the next game, Jill of the Jungle, he realized that he needed more people for his company, and began recruiting people such as Mark Rein (a businessman who was just released from id Software) and Cliff Bleszinski.
In 1996, he began working on a Tech-Demo Game for the first generation of the Unreal Engine, whose results were finally released to the public in the form of a collaboration between Epic and Digital Extremes called Unreal on April 22, 1998. It's safe to say that the engine that powered this game, and especially all posterior versions, revolutionized the videogame industry. At one point, the Unreal Engine was so ubiquitous, even companies known for developing their own game engines eventually switched to the Unreal Engine for specific games.
For a complete rundown of the games that use Epic's Unreal Engine, check here. For Epic Games's entire catalog, check here. Naming both of them on this page will be definitely redundant.
