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 is also well-known for being the force behind various 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 while working in a flower shop. He grew up in an idyllic part of rural Maryland, soon engulfed by urban sprawl from Washington, D.C. In his youth, he built go-karts and dreamed of a career creating complex machines. His oldest brother, Steve, moved 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 studying mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland. Epic's journey began with Sweeney creating ZZT, the company's first game, released as shareware in 1991. In interviews, Sweeney has credited the success of that game with fueling the early growth of his company. Sweeney later worked on the Unreal Engine, used in the Unreal series and various other video games across genres.

Despite his self-confessed social awkwardness, according to Mark Rein, Tim is not only adept at programming, but is also the main reason why Epic Games consistently had a strong lineup of talent, as he excelled at recruitment. Additionally, he is vehemently opposed to patents and is a supporter of sharing and opening information.

In 2005, Sweeney attended Wake Tech Community College Digital Game Xpo as a guest speaker. He showcased a demo of the Unreal Engine and discussed 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 @ X
• Tim Sweeney (game developer) @ Wikipedia
• Tycho (August 1, 2003). "Epic's Tim Sweeney Interview". UnrealOps. Archived from the original on December 16, 2004. Retrieved May 7, 2019.