Tim Sweeney

Tim Sweeney
Name	Timothy Sweeney
Laboral info
Birth details	Dec 1970, at Potomac, Maryland, United States.
Works at	Epic Games
Occupation	Founder Programmer
Awards	AIAS Hall of Fame Award (2012) Game Developer's Choice Lifetime Achievement Award (2017)
Worked in	Unreal Unreal Tournament Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali Unreal II: The Awakening Unreal Championship Unreal Tournament 2003 Unreal Tournament 2004 Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict Unreal Tournament 3 Unreal Tournament 4

Tim Sweeney is a programmer and the founder of Epic Games. He's also well known for being the man behind the different iterations of the popular Unreal Engine.

Bio

"There is some tendency to anoint a few programmers in the game industry as superstars. It isn't really fair; there are surely superior programmers toiling in obscurity in various places, but Tim and I both get the treatment to some degree. It has been a long time since the 'heroic age' of game programming where a single programmer really did make most of the difference on a project, but Tim was there doing hard core low level programming with the best of them, and he has continued to string together wise decisions and good leadership over more than a decade of successful products since.
In an industry well known for having its share of large egos, it was especially telling to see Tim once jokingly refer to himself as 'Carmack MX' when talking about hardware product branding."

– John Carmack

Sweeney was born to a father with a classified government job and a mother who raised three sons and worked in a flower shop. He grew up in an idyllic part of rural Maryland, swallowed all-too-soon by urban sprawl from Washington, D.C. In his youth, he built go-karts and dreamed of a career making complicated machines. His oldest brother Steve moved out to California to work in the early computer industry.

"I saw it as this glamorous lifestyle, and from that, you can tell what a geek I am."

– Tim Sweeney

Having been programming games since an early age, Sweeney established Epic 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, released as a shareware in 1991. In interviews Sweeney has credited that game's success with fueling the early growth of his company. Sweeney later worked on the Unreal Engine, used in the Unreal series and multiple other video games of different genres.

In spite of his (self-confessed) social awkwardness, according to Mark Rein, Tim is not only good at programming, but he's also the main reason why Epic Games had always a strong lineup of talent, as he was a good recruiter. He's also, according to , vehemently opposed to patents, and a fan of sharing and opening information, a philosophy that is also shared by .

In 2005, Sweeney attended Wake Tech Community College Digital Game Xpo as a guest speaker. He showed a demo of the Unreal Engine and talked about 3D Buzz's book "Mastering Unreal Technology: The Art of Level Design". Wired magazine awarded him a Rave Award in 2007 for his work on Unreal Engine 3.

Works

• Unreal
  • Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali
• Unreal Tournament
• Unreal II: The Awakening
• Unreal Championship
• Unreal Tournament 2003
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict
• Unreal Tournament 3
• Unreal Tournament 4

Trivia

• Tim's favorite mutator in Unreal Tournament 2003 was Quad Jump:

"Quad jump. It doesn't have as much impact on the gameplay as the others, but I really like things that give me more control over movement. The whole multiple-jump thing is one of those addictive features that, when you go back and play the original UT or Quake 3, you get frustrated that you can't do it, just like you long for mouselooking when you go back and play DOOM 1."

– Tim Sweeney

External links and references

• Tim Sweeney @ Twitter
• Tim Sweeney (game developer) @ Wikipedia