Guerilla Games co-founder and former Epic Games technical director Arjan Brussee is making what he styles a “European alternative” to US-developed videogame engines like Unreal and Unity (the latter originally conceived in Denmark, to be fair).
In a show of true generosity towards internet wisecrackers, he’s calling his WIP creation “The Immense Engine”. Love to see an entrepreneur just absolutely faceplant any and all Freudian undertones. Brussee is also touting both “full” generative AI integration and possible applications for the defence industry, where game engines have long been used for simulation and training.
I write about this less for the news that somebody is making a new game engine – there are plenty of other engines in development all across the globe – than for how it seems to fit a wider political picture. The UK and European countries are currently grappling with their military and economic dependence on the USA, a superpower now operated by the lovechild of Palpatine and Kool-Aid Man.
Brussee’s promise of an engine “that is fully European-hosted, built by Europeans, and complies with European rules and guidelines,” echoes belated efforts to cultivate the local technology scene on this side of the pond.
“Creating usable 3D worlds is becoming increasingly important, certainly for purposes other than just gaming,” Brussee recently told Dutch podcast De Technoloog, as transcribed and passed along by VGC.
Brussee is also of the view that “the rise of AI means that we need to approach the development of this kind of crucial software differently” – i.e. with more automation and less need to manually click on menus. He reiterated hype about the sorcerous productivity enhancing qualities of generative AI, telling De Technoloog that “if you are smart and know how to put a good framework of AI agents to work, you can do the work of ten or fifteen people.”
As ever with genAI rhetoric, it’s one big IOU from the future, with the unspoken prospect of cost-cutting for existing large teams. There’s no news yet on when The Immense Engine might become available, or how in practice it will challenge Unreal and Unity given that both are already doing a lot of stuff with generative AI.
