Interviews// Epic's VP, Mark Rein, Part 1

SPOnG: While we're on the subject of the Unreal Engine, you guys were demoing Gears of War 2 in 3D a little while back to show off the engine doing 3D. Does Epic have any plans for its own 3D games, or was this purely a thing for the engine?

Mark Rein: I don't know. You know, the UDK (Unreal Development Kit) has 3D support in it, so the tools are already there for people to use if they want to. We demonstrated that way back at GDC and we shipped it with the latest version of UDK - or one of them between GDC and now. I believe we'll have games in 3D. Tron is in 3D - Sony was showing it at E3. Mortal Kombat uses our engine, it's in 3D. So things like Move, Kinect, 3D, we're fully endorsing all these things. We cheer on our licensees who are making use of them.

Whether we do it is strictly from a 'does it suit our game or not' (point of view). You know, is Kinect something you want in Gears of War? I don't know. That's for the designers to figure out. We don't hamper our game that way. We develop the technology we need for our games and we develop the technologies that we think are important for games that we're going to make in the future, such as we're doing with the mobile stuff. The rest is for the licensees to figure out - how to then take that and extend it for their needs.

So, the Kinect games - that Kinect Adventures game, that's Unreal Engine 3. And that Sony Sorcery game, that was Unreal Engine 3.

SPOnG: That looks good.

Mark Rein: Yeah, that looks awesome.


SPOnG: So, there's obviously an advantage for you guys to include it in the technology. Do you think 3D's important for the industry? Do you think there's a danger of it just being a fad? People are already calling that on the movie front.

Mark Rein: Look, the real answer is that the customers will decide these things. Customers will decide if 3D is important to them or not, if Move is important, if Kinect is important, if mobile is important. We're totally customer-driven. We have to build great products that we have a great passion for. We do recognise that we're customers too.

So, if the guys designing - just from an Epic Games point of view as opposed to licensing and technology - if they decide they really want 3D, they can have 3D. If they decide they really want Kinect, they can have Kinect. If they decide they really want Move, they can have Move. So, you know, customers will decide if the technologies are ultimately going to be successful and the game designers will decide what they want to provide.

Personally, I think some of the 3D stuff is cool, I don't know if I'm going to rearrange my living room for it or not. That's a differenct question - I already invested in a bunch of TVs that aren't 3D, so I don't know [grins]. But certainly it's a value-add in the movies, certainly some of the games benefit from it.

Move and Kinect, I think these are the same things - great technologies. Those ones are easy to integrate, I don't need to buy a brand new TV. But yeah, I'm excited about all this stuff. I'm just very bullish on the industry as a whole, from the lowest common denominator of web browsing games right up to the awesome AAA super-amazing 3D stuff, so I'm pretty easy to please that way.