THQ Licenses Unreal Engine 3

Adding to a long list of existing licensees, major publisher and developer THQ has announced a licensing agreement with Epic Games for the use of Epic's Unreal Engine 3 technology in future games. Epic's Unreal Engine 3 has already been announced for both Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, and multiple licensees (including Microsoft Game Studios, Atari, Real Time Worlds, Namco, Midway, Silicon Knights, and VU Games) have signed up to use the middleware, which is currently the dominant third-party game engine going into the next-generation transition. The company is also revealing new technology at GDC, including FaceFX cinema-quality facial animation with auto-generated lip-synching, new physics-based animation that provides gameplay features (like blending hit reactions with character animations), a new in-editor performance optimization tools, a new Collada-compatible import pipeline, and Epic's new high-performance multi-threaded renderer. "Unreal Engine 3 is widely regarded as a premier next-generation engine technology," said Jack Sorensen, executive vice president of worldwide studios, THQ. "We plan to complement our own proprietary engines with the Unreal Engine technology to create truly innovative gameplay experiences on both next-gen consoles and Windows PC." "In the past few years, THQ has built one of the strongest development organizations in the industry," said Mark Rein, vice president, Epic Games. "We're thrilled that their teams will be utilizing Unreal Engine 3 in some of their upcoming projects. We can't wait to see what our technology will enable in their future releases."