For Americans, following European news can feel like you’re trying to watch a football game on your neighbor’s TV while there are two shootings going on simultaneously in your own living room, a nu-metal concert going on, and someone driving a pickup truck for no reason. But it’s worth keeping an eye on Europe right now, because in areas like tech and defense, a trend has emerged in which the Europeans are far ahead of our BS, and moving ahead – that’s the environment anyway. For example, last month, the French government began the transition from Windows to Linux.
And now, the Dutch co-creator of the famous 90s game Jazz Jackrabbit has a dream of a Europe free of the Unreal Engine, a load-bearing pillar of the gaming world that is also used in other media, and he may have the ability and experience to make it happen. However, caution is probably warranted, as he seems well and truly AI-piled.
As spotted by Video Games Chronicle, Horizon: Zero Dawn studio Guerrilla Games co-founder Arjan Brusi appeared on the Dutch tech podcast De Technolog earlier this week to talk about his project, the “Immence Engine,” an alternative piece of general-purpose software that would theoretically provide a true alternative to Unreal Engine.
The Unreal Engine is the software foundation of not only Fortnite, but also classics like Gears of War, BioShock Infinite, Mass Effect, and Batman Arkham City. It is also used in Hollywood productions like The Mandalorian and is even used to create popular YouTube content for children. European game engines exist, notably Germany-based CryEngine, which is associated with the Far Cry games, but it is mostly a first-person shooter engine, and has long struggled for adoption.
If anyone has the credibility to make-it-unreal-engines-but-for-musli-eating-people, it’s probably Brucie. He is a successful gaming entrepreneur in his own right, and has worked for several decades at Epic Games, the parent company of Unreal Engine.
Some of the translated statements about their plans for the Immense engine come from Video Games Chronicle (a UK-based blog), so it’s unclear who or what actually translated them. Brusi bluntly stated, “No one is currently building an engine that is completely European-hosted, built by Europeans, and compliant with European regulations and guidelines.” He also alluded to the goal of Unreal-like generalization, saying, “Creating usable 3D worlds is becoming increasingly important, certainly for purposes other than just gaming.”
But he also candidly claimed, “The rise of AI means we need to approach the development of critical software like this differently,” and “If you’re smart and know how to put together a good framework of AI agents, you can do the work of ten or fifteen people.” So the codebase for this project looks like it will be heavily, um, AI-assisted. Maybe Brusi will use the Mistral model to keep things European.
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