The legendary Tim Sweeney will join some pretty elite company at this year’s Game Developers Choice Award ceremony. The committee behind the awards announced that Sweeney will receive the GDC Lifetime Achievement award at the event on March 1st. He will join the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto, Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux, John Carmack, and Todd Howard, among others, as a recipient of the award.
Tim Sweeney founded the development studio Epic Games (then called Epic MegaGames) in 1991, and himself helped develop the gamesย ZZT,ย Jill of the Jungle,ย andย Super ZZT. The company continued to find success as a shareware developer, but it was not really until 1998 that Sweeney began to make his ultimate mark on the gaming world.
In 1998, Epic Games releasedย Unreal, and Sweeney is credited as one of the central creators of the game’s engine, also titled “Unreal.” The Unreal engine was licensed out to a variety of other game development companies, and was (and still is) the bedrock of other critically acclaimed games. Some games that use the Unreal engine are the BioShock series,ย Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequels,ย Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, and theย Assassin’s Creed series.
Sweeney also helped makeย UnrealScript, which helped make the engine more accessible so non-coders in the gaming community could use it to make new content. This helped pave the way for the massive amount of user-created content that is available today for a variety of games. The Unreal Engine isย currently in its fourth major editionย and is still being used in many blockbuster games, includingย Ark: Survival Evolved andย Rocket League.
The GDC Awards ceremony is hosted by Double Fine’s Tim Schafer and will be broadcast live on Twitchย March 1st, 2017.
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