Unreal Engine / Media Notes

If you've played video games in the past decade or so, you've probably seen this logo.

Unreal Engine is a series of Game Engines by Epic Games, named for their Unreal series, which was the flagship series for it until the more commercially-profitable Gears of War series and Fortnite took over the role. It is written in C++ and supports a wide variety of platforms.

The engine is free to use for anyone with a standard license, with commercial licenses starting at $1,500. Thanks to its flexibility and graphical prowess, the engine has become incredibly popular with game developers, from small indie creators to AAA studios. It was named the Most Successful Game Engine of All Time by Guinness World Records in 2014.

Versions of Unreal Engine include:

Unreal Engine 1: Created for Unreal, later went on to be used in Unreal Tournament, Rune, Star Trek: The Next Generation - Klingon Honor Guard, Deus Ex, The Wheel of Time, Clive Barker's Undying. And if they hadn't been canned, Jazz Jackrabbit 3D and a Hired Guns sequel to the old DOS/Amiga game.
- Duke Nukem Forever (finally released in 2011) used a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 1, as shown here.
Unreal Engine 2 (and 2.5): Unreal II: The Awakening, Unreal Championship, Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, BioShock, Splinter Cell, Deus Ex: Invisible War, XIII, Rainbow Six 3, Red Steel, Tribes: Vengeance, Red Orchestra, Killing Floor, Postal 2, SWAT 4, Thief: Deadly Shadows, etc.
- A special, Xbox-tailored version of the engine, Unreal Engine 2X, was used for Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict.
Unreal Engine 3 (probably the most popular engine during The Seventh Generation of Console Video Games): Gears of War^noteAnd the commercials by Digital Domain, Unreal Tournament III, Bulletstorm, Rainbow Six: Vegas, BioShock Infinite, the Mass Effect series, The Last Remnant, Lost Odyssey, Mirror's Edge, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City, Asura's Wrath, Dungeon Defenders, Lollipop Chainsaw, Transformers: War for Cybertron, Army of Two, XCOM: Enemy Unknown^noteAnd, by extension, XCOM: Enemy Within, Guilty Gear Xrd, among others. It has also seen use in the TV series LazyTown.
- Unreal Engine 3 also has its own offshoot, the UDK (Unreal Development Kit), a free version of Unreal Engine 3 (with low cost licensing for indie developers) designed to compete with Unity for the aforementioned indie developer market. The two engines, both with high popularity in the indie community, have developed a bit of a Fandom Rivalry.
- Epic sued Silicon Knights over the use of Unreal Engine 3 code in Too Human and X-Men: Destiny. Silicon Knights charged Epic with selling the engine unfinished and giving bad support for developers licensing it. What really happened, according to the judges, was that Silicon Knights reverse-engineered the engine for Too Human until they believed there was no more Epic code left and stopped paying Epic royalties... except there still was some Epic code left in the "new" engine used in the released product, and so Epic won the lawsuit. This cost Silicon Knights their existence, by the way.
Unreal Engine 4, which both advances the graphics of the Unreal Engine to next-gen levels while simplifying the development process in many ways (such as switching to a fully dynamic lighting pipeline and, perhaps controversially removing UnrealScript in favor of extending Kismet (Unreal's visual scripting system, now called "Blueprint") and C++ access). Like the UDK, Epic has been attempting to reach out to indies far more with UE4 compared to UE3, likely to compete with the rising popularity of Unity. On March 2015, UE4 was made free-to-use with a 5% yearly royalty cost for games that make more than $3,000 per quarter. Originally, the first UE4 game was meant to be Epic's own Fortnite, specifically its Save the World mode. However, thanks to a lengthy Troubled Production, this never really panned out and the game was released years later.

Unreal Engine 4 is particularly notable for being incredibly popular with Japanese developers, almost to the same extent that Unreal 3 was in the west. Japanese games developed on it include Dragon Ball Fighter Z, Dragon Quest XI, Shenmue III, Shin Megami Tensei V, The Caligula Effect, Soul Calibur VI, Street Fighter V, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Tekken 7, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Kingdom Hearts III, Yoshi's Crafted World, and Pikmin 4. This can likely be attributed to both to Epic Games providing proper Japanese documentation and support, which they failed to do with Unreal Engine 3, and the fact that in the seventh console generation, Japanese developers ran into a bad habit of spending years and years making their own expensive engines that often only saw use in a few games, or never saw use at all - in comparison, simply using Unreal Engine 4 and paying its royalties is a much better proposition.

Similar to the LazyTown case above with UE3, UE4 has also been employed for filmmaking and TV shows such as for real-time CGI sets in The Mandalorian, digital sets for Reboot The Guardian Code and the anime adaptation of No Guns Life, CGI effects and full-on fight scenes in Kamen Rider Saber, and weather broadcasts around the world. The engine has also been used to make animated series such as Zafari and the early works of GLITCH Productions, namely Meta Runner (which Epic themselves provided funding for during the first two seasons), Sunset Paradise, and the pilot of Murder Drones.
Unreal Engine 5, announced in 2020 for the PlayStation 5, was revealed in a video alongside a tech demo called Lumen in the Land of Nanite, showcasing the two new techs meant to help developers: the dynamic lighting system Lumen and the polygon scaling system Nanite. Two more tech demos were released; one set in the same world as Lumen in the Land of Nanite, known as Valley of the Ancients, was released alongside the engine's early access launch, and another, The Matrix Awakens, set in the universe of, well, The Matrix franchise, was released during the 2021 Game Awards. A few games that are currently known to be developed in Unreal Engine 5 are Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, Dragon Quest XII and Kingdom Hearts IV. Fortnite also switched from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 as of Chapter 3 in December 2021. Glitch Productions also moved over to Unreal 5 starting with the second episode of Murder Drones.