Interview: Epic's Mark Rein and CliffyB

April 12, 2007 | By: James Brightman

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At GDC last month we had the pleasure of meeting with Epic Games Vice President Mark Rein and Lead Game Designer Cliff Bleszinski (a.k.a. CliffyB). We discussed their raking in the awards for Gears, diversifying the uses for Unreal Engine, storytelling in games, thoughts on the console wars, reaction to Denis Dyack's "one console future" and more.

[Note: interview conducted during the day prior to the Choice Awards]

GameDaily BIZ: So congrats to you for cleaning up with all those awards at D.I.C.E.

Mark Rein: Thank you so much.

BIZ: [to CliffyB] You were up there receiving award after award...

Cliff Bleszinski: It was a good problem to have.

BIZ: Any thoughts on your chances at the Choice Awards tonight?

CB: Tim Schaefer is hosting right? I think it's going to be a fun, entertaining evening. My fingers are crossed. Hopefully we'll win something but if we don't , you know, it's fine. [Gears did indeed win three awards, including Best Game � Ed.]

BIZ: What are your thoughts on how those two awards show stack up and what they mean to you as a game developer?

CB: Peer recognition is extremely satisfying. It's one thing to sell a lot of copies of the game; it's another to get great reviews. This is kind of the third validation of success. I know so many people in the business—I've been in the business for 15 years now—and to have them say, "Hey good job!" ... a little pat on the back, it's really rewarding actually.

BIZ: So is there any company that ISN'T licensing the Unreal Engine at this point? You guys seem to be doing very, very well with it...

MR: We've done well, but we still represent a very, very small percentage of the games being created within the industry. I know it seems like everybody's using it, but it's still a game here, a game there kind of thing, so there's still lots of room for us to grow. At our Epic Games press conference we showed off Monster Madness, which is a game from Artificial Studios being published by Southpeak, and it's a completely different kind of game, an overhead view kind of "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" ... the kind of thing you exactly would not expect to be made with Unreal Engine 3. And the developer talked about how he couldn't have made it without UE3; he did it with a team of 15 people and 9 outsourcers in 10 months, and it looks great and is getting close to being released on Xbox 360. It's going to come out on PS3 as well. It's just a perfect example of—they did it for a fraction of the cost of Gears—if people just use their imagination, there are so many more games that could be made.

I saw some great guys today show me a UT2004 mod that was this awesome kind of puzzle blaster game, and I was like, "Ok I'm going to hook you up with UE3; make me that game in UE3." This is probably a three-week job that I could use as a demo to show people that you don't have to make Gears of War or Mass Effect or the next giant MMO from Sony Online Entertainment. You can make all kinds of games with the technology. So I think that's really our goal for the next year, to just remind people that you can make these big, huge epic games if you will, or you can also make all sorts of other cool games like for Xbox Live Arcade or Sony's EDI or PC downloadable titles like Roboblitz.

So we definitely want to get that point across so that there are more games made with UE3... we want to show people it's not just a shooter engine. And right now, if you look at most of the big games you've heard of, well they're somewhat shooter-like. But we want people to get the message that you can save even more money on some of these other styles of games, especially on some of the smaller games. So that's a challenge for us and we're definitely going to take that head-on and guys like Jeremy [Stieglitz] from Artificial Studios are going to help us get that point across.

BIZ: I'm amazed that Gears cost just $10 million to make. But for the companies that aren't currently using UE3, besides telling everyone to go out and license your tech, what advice would you give them?

MR: Well, you're probably leaving a lot of money on the table or spending a lot of money you don't have to spend, and money not spent is money in your pocket; it's profit. That's really the goal of UE3. Of all the money we've sunk tens of millions of dollars into it so we can make profit from our games, so we can make games at a reasonable cost, and other companies have been able to leverage that technology as well at a very reasonable price. People don't license UE3 because it costs them money; they license UE3 because it saves them money. That's the big story, the bottom line.

BIZ: Some developers have found making games for PS3 somewhat difficult. What do you think? How does developing for the multicore 360 architecture compare to the 8 SPUs of the PS3?

MR: If you use UE3, one shouldn't be more difficult than the other. They're different architectures with different bang for the buck. Xbox works one way and PlayStation works the other, but we've managed to get our engine [running]. We showed UT3 here on PlayStation 3 today and we've managed to get our engine to run well on both systems. Obviously we did Xbox 360 first because of [Gears] and now we're doing that same optimization effort for PS3. People that license our technology, it's not a big issue for them. They are going to have to write some native code, so they're going to have to learn to use each system... but for the most part from the content side and getting gameplay up and running and AI and things that we provide, we insulate you from that.