Sweeney described the history of the company in 2016 as four eras: the shareware era from founding through 1997 as the company grew to 15 employees the Unreal era from 1998 to 2005 as the company focused on developing that franchise through external publishers and grew to 25 employees the Gears of War era from 2006 to 2011 as the company shifted focus to console games and grew to around 200 employees and the current era where the company moved back to PC games and self-publishing, spinning off or closing some of its subsidiary developers such as People Can Fly and Big Huge Games. In addition to games, Epic develops and licenses the Unreal Engine, which is also used as the game engine for many of its own games, and runs the Epic Games Store, a digital video game storefront for Microsoft Windows and macOS. Epic returned to retail publishing in 2015 for its own titles, and has solely self-published since. In 2006 the company launched its Gears of War series of games, and in 2010 the company moved into mobile games with the Infinity Blade series after purchasing Chair Entertainment. After the name change, the company focused almost solely on the Unreal series of shooters for the next few years, and expanded from PC games to console games.

īeginning with the 1996 game Fire Fight, Epic ceased its publishing and self-publishing operations, and after the release and success of Unreal (1998) renamed itself in 1999 to Epic Games and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina it and a temporary office in Canada during Unreal 's development were the first time the company had a central office for their employees. Epic also slowly expanded in size, reaching 8 employees by 1994. They additionally published titles by other developers such as Epic Pinball (1993) by Digital Extremes and Tyrian (1995) by Eclipse Software.

Over the next few years, the company continued to make PC games, largely self-published, including the side-scrollers Jill of the Jungle (1992) and Jazz Jackrabbit (1994). After releasing one game under that name, ZZT (1991), Sweeney renamed the company to Epic MegaGames in early 1992 'to make it look like we were a big company' even though it had no other employees or offices.

It was founded by Tim Sweeney as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, originally located in his parents' house in Potomac, Maryland. Video games by developer/publisher The current logo of Epic GamesĮpic Games is an American video game and software developer based in Cary, North Carolina.

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