5 ms·

FWIW, most games before early 2000s built all their tooling from scratch as there wasn't off the shelf engines to use. Unreal engine came out in 98 and Source i

FWIW, most games before early 2000s built all their tooling from scratch as there wasn't off the shelf engines to use. Unreal engine came out in 98 and Source in 2004

deaddodo 3y ago
That's not quite true. There were plenty of 90s game engines. They just weren't as general purpose. So you would end up rewriting a good chunk anyways to get what you wanted.
- happymellon 3y ago
  They managed to do this to Quake. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGknUiihpkI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGknUiihpkI
masfoobar 3y ago
There were game engines in the 90s -- Quake Engine, Build Engine, Unreal Engine.. to name some of the popular ones. You also had GoldSrc, a modified Quake Engine for Half-Life 1. Many companies created their own and was not available outside the business. Dark Engine used in the Thief:Dark Project games is an example. Think of companies like Nintendo having their own engine which powered games like Mario 64 and, I believe, Ocarina of Time was a modified version of that. The "off the shelf" engines available at that time (like Unreal or Quake engine) might have been decent for certain type of games. Today, you could say many games could be done with Unity, Godot, or Unreal. There are still companies today using their own.
CalRobert 3y ago
I think some of the early FPS engines were re-used, with Rise of the Triad using the Wolfenstein 3d one.
- TonyTrapp 3y ago
  Engines that come to mind: XnGine (Daggerfall, Terminator, ...), Dark Engine (Thief, System Shock 2), Build (Duke 3D, Blood...). Yes, they existed before the 2000s, but the difference to today is that there were many engines being reused for a handful of games at most. Today it's few engines running most games.
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    I wanted to mention the odd adventure game Normality as using the Doom engine, but I can't find a source
    - wk_end 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure Normality ran on the in-house Gremlin Interactive engine that powered the excellent Realms of the Haunting.
  - sonicanatidae 3y ago
    +1 for the Daggerfall mention. I haven't thought about that game in 1000 years and loved it.
  - holoduke 3y ago
    Battlefield, gta, alan wake, ms flightsim, cyberpunk, hogsward (unreal) all top games with different engines. Agree that unreal engine has many games, but plenty of alternatives
    - TonyTrapp 3y ago
      That's a pretty small selection of well-known AAA games. Those few examples really don't change the general skew towards using 3rd party engines these days vs. few games doing something like that in the 90s. And in fact, most of these engines have also been reused between games (with heavy modifications of course - e.g. Remedy's Northlight engine has been evolving since Alan Wake 1).
      - 3y ago
- lostlogin 3y ago
  You’ve reminded me of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It was very limited in terms of maps and possible multiplayer only. It was fantastic.
treflop 3y ago
Wasn’t Quake 1 reasonably off the shelf for its time? Released in ‘96, it did have a map editor and a number of games were built with it. Source itself being built from Quake 1…
- TonyTrapp 3y ago
  idTech 2 was specifically built for Quake 1, and only later it was licensed to other developers as well. So it was not an off-the shelf solution id could simply take for building Quake. It was tailored for that game.
  - BikiniPrince 3y ago
    They specifically built Quake to sell the engine. They knew it would be difficult to actually sell an engine without a successful title.
    - franzb 3y ago
      Interesting, I’ve never heard about that. Do you have a source?
      - mike_d 3y ago
        I don't think they specifically understood the idea of a "game engine" as the core product at the time. But there are plenty of references if you Google a bit that Quake was designed for modders due to the popularity of DOOM mods - so developer experience was absolutely taken into account from the start. They had already done licensing deals for the DOOM engine at that point, including the greatest game of all time "Chex Quest." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
        aoanla 3y ago
        Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate it from the engine code so modders could easily make new games without needing access to the full engine source. (And QuakeC was supposed to be simpler as a language than C, which it... is, but at the cost of weird compromises like a single number type (float) which is also used to store bitfields by directly manipulating power of two values. Which works, of course, until your power of 2 is big enough to force the precision to drop below 1...)
LarsDu88 3y ago
Jedi Knight 2 came out in 2002 and the original Call of Duty came out in 2003, both running heavily modified versions of John Carmack's Quake III engine
- bpye 3y ago
  Related - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quake_-_family_tree.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quake_-_family_tree.svg
- modeless 3y ago
  Valve originally started in 1996 by licensing the Quake engine for Half-Life.
MisterTea 3y ago
id sold a few Doom and a bunch of Quake 1/2/3 licenses back in the day. Off the top of my head: Heretic and Hexen used the Doom engine, their sequels used the Quake and Quake 2 engines respectively. Strife was an FPS RPG that was Doom based. Half-Life started out as a HEAVILY modified Quake engine and rumor has it that there is still a bit of Quake code in Source. Duke Nukem Forever started out on Quake before moving to Unreal.
- rasz 3y ago
  I heard an interview about Doom port to hmm 3DO? and it cost them one time payment of $50K cash money to outright buy Doom assets + game engine license.
- partiallypro 3y ago
  Call of Duty and Medal of Honor both used id Tech 3 (aka the Quake 3 engine), as did some of the Star Wars games, etc. Unfortunately, The Source Engine came out around the time of id Tech 4, and it really took the reins, with Unreal Engine hitting a stride thereafter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_3#Games_using_a_proprietary_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_3#Games_using_a_propri...
Keyframe 3y ago
id Tech engines, Renderware and a few other big ones were for sure available at the time and used. Earlier, during 90's was another situation however.
Terr_ 3y ago
That reminds me of how Torque [0] debuted in 2001 using Tribes 2. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_(game_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_(game_engine)
- jamesu 3y ago
  Torque was pretty instrumental in kick-starting my career. Glad it's still being maintained to this day (despite it arguably getting steamrolled by unity and mismanagement).
partiallypro 3y ago
The Quake 3 engine was incredibly popular in the early 2000s.

FWIW, most games before early 2000s built all their tooling from scratch as there wasn't off the shelf engines to use. Unreal engine came out in 98 and Source in 2004

deaddodo 3y ago

That's not quite true. There were plenty of 90s game engines. They just weren't as general purpose. So you would end up rewriting a good chunk anyways to get what you wanted.

happymellon 3y ago
They managed to do this to Quake. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGknUiihpkI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGknUiihpkI

masfoobar 3y ago

There were game engines in the 90s -- Quake Engine, Build Engine, Unreal Engine.. to name some of the popular ones. You also had GoldSrc, a modified Quake Engine for Half-Life 1. Many companies created their own and was not available outside the business. Dark Engine used in the Thief:Dark Project games is an example. Think of companies like Nintendo having their own engine which powered games like Mario 64 and, I believe, Ocarina of Time was a modified version of that. The "off the shelf" engines available at that time (like Unreal or Quake engine) might have been decent for certain type of games. Today, you could say many games could be done with Unity, Godot, or Unreal. There are still companies today using their own.

CalRobert 3y ago

I think some of the early FPS engines were re-used, with Rise of the Triad using the Wolfenstein 3d one.

TonyTrapp 3y ago
Engines that come to mind: XnGine (Daggerfall, Terminator, ...), Dark Engine (Thief, System Shock 2), Build (Duke 3D, Blood...). Yes, they existed before the 2000s, but the difference to today is that there were many engines being reused for a handful of games at most. Today it's few engines running most games.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  I wanted to mention the odd adventure game Normality as using the Doom engine, but I can't find a source
  - wk_end 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure Normality ran on the in-house Gremlin Interactive engine that powered the excellent Realms of the Haunting.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  +1 for the Daggerfall mention. I haven't thought about that game in 1000 years and loved it.
- holoduke 3y ago
  Battlefield, gta, alan wake, ms flightsim, cyberpunk, hogsward (unreal) all top games with different engines. Agree that unreal engine has many games, but plenty of alternatives
  - TonyTrapp 3y ago
    That's a pretty small selection of well-known AAA games. Those few examples really don't change the general skew towards using 3rd party engines these days vs. few games doing something like that in the 90s. And in fact, most of these engines have also been reused between games (with heavy modifications of course - e.g. Remedy's Northlight engine has been evolving since Alan Wake 1).
    - 3y ago
lostlogin 3y ago
You’ve reminded me of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It was very limited in terms of maps and possible multiplayer only. It was fantastic.

treflop 3y ago

Wasn’t Quake 1 reasonably off the shelf for its time? Released in ‘96, it did have a map editor and a number of games were built with it. Source itself being built from Quake 1…

TonyTrapp 3y ago
idTech 2 was specifically built for Quake 1, and only later it was licensed to other developers as well. So it was not an off-the shelf solution id could simply take for building Quake. It was tailored for that game.
- BikiniPrince 3y ago
  They specifically built Quake to sell the engine. They knew it would be difficult to actually sell an engine without a successful title.
  - franzb 3y ago
    Interesting, I’ve never heard about that. Do you have a source?
    - mike_d 3y ago
      I don't think they specifically understood the idea of a "game engine" as the core product at the time. But there are plenty of references if you Google a bit that Quake was designed for modders due to the popularity of DOOM mods - so developer experience was absolutely taken into account from the start. They had already done licensing deals for the DOOM engine at that point, including the greatest game of all time "Chex Quest." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
      - aoanla 3y ago
        Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate it from the engine code so modders could easily make new games without needing access to the full engine source. (And QuakeC was supposed to be simpler as a language than C, which it... is, but at the cost of weird compromises like a single number type (float) which is also used to store bitfields by directly manipulating power of two values. Which works, of course, until your power of 2 is big enough to force the precision to drop below 1...)

LarsDu88 3y ago

Jedi Knight 2 came out in 2002 and the original Call of Duty came out in 2003, both running heavily modified versions of John Carmack's Quake III engine

bpye 3y ago
Related - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quake_-_family_tree.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quake_-_family_tree.svg
modeless 3y ago
Valve originally started in 1996 by licensing the Quake engine for Half-Life.

MisterTea 3y ago

id sold a few Doom and a bunch of Quake 1/2/3 licenses back in the day. Off the top of my head: Heretic and Hexen used the Doom engine, their sequels used the Quake and Quake 2 engines respectively. Strife was an FPS RPG that was Doom based. Half-Life started out as a HEAVILY modified Quake engine and rumor has it that there is still a bit of Quake code in Source. Duke Nukem Forever started out on Quake before moving to Unreal.

rasz 3y ago
I heard an interview about Doom port to hmm 3DO? and it cost them one time payment of $50K cash money to outright buy Doom assets + game engine license.
partiallypro 3y ago
Call of Duty and Medal of Honor both used id Tech 3 (aka the Quake 3 engine), as did some of the Star Wars games, etc. Unfortunately, The Source Engine came out around the time of id Tech 4, and it really took the reins, with Unreal Engine hitting a stride thereafter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_3#Games_using_a_proprietary_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_3#Games_using_a_propri...

Keyframe 3y ago

id Tech engines, Renderware and a few other big ones were for sure available at the time and used. Earlier, during 90's was another situation however.

Terr_ 3y ago

That reminds me of how Torque [0] debuted in 2001 using Tribes 2. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_(game_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_(game_engine)

jamesu 3y ago
Torque was pretty instrumental in kick-starting my career. Glad it's still being maintained to this day (despite it arguably getting steamrolled by unity and mismanagement).

partiallypro 3y ago

The Quake 3 engine was incredibly popular in the early 2000s.