McGee Defends UE3 in Epic, Silicon Knights Battle

As the release date for Silicon Knights' Too Human fast approaches, American McGee is defending Epic's Unreal Engine 3, which lies at the core of an ongoing legal battle between Silicon Knights and Epic. McGee, designer of Alice, Bad Day LA and, most recently, the pictured Grimm episodic series on GameTap (which he built using UE3), is weighing in on his blog about allegations by Silicon Knights that Epic failed to provide them with a complete engine. His defense of Unreal Engine 3 is sparked by Denis Dyack's recent comments to the UK-based Develop magazine that Epic "failed to provide a working game engine" to Silicon Knights. Silicon Knights later used its own technology to develop Too Human, and then filed suit against Epic, claiming that the engine company "...intentionally and wrongfully has used the fees from [Unreal Engine 3] licenses to launch its own game to widespread commercial success while simultaneously sabotaging efforts by Silicon Knights and others to develop their own video games." "Having used UE3 to build Grimm and spent considerable time in the past working with Id’s tools, I’ve followed this story with amazement," says McGee. "To expect a licensed engine, fresh out of the box, would require no modification or improvements to achieve development goals on a new title is ludicrous." Continues McGee, "But to build an entirely new engine as an alternative to improving an existing one - sounds a bit unreasonable. And to build that new engine inside 1 year, then ship a title with it? Now things are starting to sound surreal." Looking forward to seeing how things play out, McGee concludes, "My guess is that there’s more than a little UE3 still in Too Human." For their part, Silicon Knights' original lawsuit claims that: "Progress on the Silicon Knights’ Engine continues to date and, at this time, the Silicon Knights Engine is completely independent of Epic’s Engine and certainly derives no benefit from the unworkable source code provided by Epic."