YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Sweeney

lines on the record: 296
first: 2025-04-30
most recent: 2025-04-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Techniques for 3D graphics and texture mapping, and he wrote some articles in one of the programming magazines of the day and explained it and showed assembly code to do texture mapping, drawing these CD graphics on the screen. And it was actually really simple stuff. I was like, oh, I can do that.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The wizardry of Doom especially was so incredible that I gave up on programming for like six font size. I was like, I never be able to compete with this. I have no idea what we're going to do. We just keep making 2D games and hope that the business goes on. But that was the nature of Carmax Wizardry. He had done things that were not just one innovation leap ahead, but like a dozen simultaneously interplaying in a way that you couldn't pick them apart into their component pieces. Funny thing happened. Michael Abrash, longtimer in computer graphics, wrote a book on”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel that you're there. Yeah. Especially when you turn the lights down in your room and you turn the sound up on your speakers, and it will scare you. And you'll feel like that fireball that's coming at you is going to kill you. That was an amazing time because we hadn't experienced that before. There was nothing like that. You'd watch a movie, a scary movie, or whatever, but it was just this thing that was happening. This was you. This was you in a 3D world.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely visceral and real. You might look at it today from our point of view of a modern. Gameplay with 20 terafops of computing power in your device and say, oh, that's not very impressive. But it was amazing at the time”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was all going great. The company had a little office, and we were copying floppy disks and mailing them out. But when Wolfenstein came out, we realized the future of gaming is going to be 3D. There have been a lot of experiments in 3D before that hadn't been great. There were 2D renderings mazes that were not in real time and you were always looking north-south, east, or west. And then there were vector graphics with little wireframes moving around and things. But Wolfenstein was the first game that was fast enough running at 30 frames per second that really felt immersive. It felt like you were there. And this Castle Wolfenstein fighting Nazis. That was a really amazing and immersive experience. 3D graphics were pretty primitive and software followed shockingly fast with Doom, which was much, much more capable 3D engine, which had stairs. And though it was still what we call two and a hefty, there was environments that were very realistic textures that were very realistic. You know, a form of lighting that was approximate but incredibly realistic and just such great artistry and sound effects. It feeled”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was a very interesting time. Epic, after my first couple of games that had recruited developers, usually college students, high school students who are just working on their own had real skills but didn't have an outlet for their work. EPIC had been matchmaking the best artists and programmers together from all over the world. Jazz Jackrabbit was Cliff Luzinski, a high school kid in California had made a really cool adventure game together with Ariane Brucey, a demo coder from Holland who would make amazing graphical stuff and had built a 2D game engine and connected them together and a musician Robert Allen in California and by telephone and modem and so on we were building these little 2D games and having quite a lot of success there are a bunch of people making thousands of dollars a month while they were still students and royalties from the games that Epic was kind of producing and by coordinating people with people and publishing through ShareWare”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it wasn't much risk if that hadn't succeeded. I guess I could have figured out how people get mechanical engineering jobs and pursued that. But once it took off and once the... Order has started coming in and people started writing letters saying they're enjoying the game. I knew I was going to go all out and try to build a company there and succeed. And that was like going to be my big goal.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the human element was always pervasive, you know, because I did not only receive orders, but people would actually write letters. We wrote letters back then in the 1990s. People would say how much they were enjoying the game and how their kids were playing the game and so on and so on. So very connected. And I think a lot of businesses have to make scary decisions because you're spending potentially all of the money you have to take a shot at something that you're not sure will succeed. I was very fortunate starting a business like this because it didn't really need any capital. The capital was, well, the several thousand dollars in computers I'd bought by mowing lawns.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say it was the opposite of Lonely because the thing that's burdened me to actually release this was seeing kids playing the game and my neighborhood and having fun. I mean, like, this is really good. And seeing them enjoying it and laughing and pointing at the screen and getting together and just wanting to play more.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. Because if you look at every market, there's a few markets where the current leader came late to the space, usually because the prior leader failed so horribly. But most of the time the company that's succeeding in winning in a market is the first or second entrant there. They've just continually buoyed their success.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A much better chance of success is in releasing something that hasn't been done before, being really unique and reaching an audience, even if big or medium size or small, reaching an audience and becoming really popular with that, making some money from it and being able to reinvest and then expand towards your ultimate dream. I think the one shot go from idea to commercial success at massive scale is a lot less likely than the multi-step process of continually build better and better stuff over time until you get into a position of excellence.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see that trend has repeated itself like there was ZZT. Before that, there was Bill Budge's pinball construction set. That was the 1980s Apple game that let users build their own pinball tables. And since then, you've had some of the world's most successful games follow that path, like Minecraft. You can build your own stuff, Roblox. Now, Fortnite creative and underwriter for Fortnite. Games that become platforms for other people to build stuff was real opportunity. I think the big thing to realize as for indie developers right now is there's massive, massive competition in every major genre. And it's very unlikely that unless you just”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Age of real graphical games with interesting graphics. And so it wasn't even trying to compete in that area, but it was able to compete in a different area, which is that it wasn't just my three games I'd made and shipped as a trilogy that were successful and drove the success of the product. It was the fact I released an editor, and there's a whole community around it.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bring the real world friends into the games they're playing and have the opportunity to build up a community around that. So the other lesson there was just minimize the friction of people getting into your game, make it easy to get into and make it fun. I think the other, well, I was very fortunate. ZZT was a funny game. It was not like much like any other game. It had much worse graphics because it was all just text characters, smiley faces and other Greek letters and things participating in this game simulation. They were kind of iconic representations of characters rather than real ones. And, you know, this was decades into the...”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, one of the critical things that Epic always worked hard to do was to make something different that nobody else was doing. Try to satisfy a small audience rather than competing globally with a game juggernaut. Back in the 1990s, Epic was new, but electronic arts and Activision and the other big publishers had been around for a decade and they were huge companies. It had giant retail distribution networks. If I tried to make a game and then convince them to publish it, I doubt I could have had a chance and I doubt even if I made a successful game that I would have made much money from it, though they might have. And I said they're a unique angle to Epic then with shareware. And that was just the idea that if we distribute our game differently, then we can reach a much larger audience than these bigger competitors by virtue of this first episode of the game being free. It was kind of the advent of what later became free to play. And the logic of that is just as true now as it was then. If the thing is free and anybody can get into it, then it's going to spread from friend to friend as people...”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, it's been a funny transition for the game business. Epic started out making share games distributed digitally. But, you know, as the first 3D games took off, like Wolfenstein and Doom from id Software, and then Unreal from us took off to reach a huge audience of millions of users. We had to go into retail stores. So we worked with a retail publisher and they made a box and they put CD-ROMs in the box. And then the world started transitioning back to digitally. And that transition didn't start well, right? The initial transition of gaming to digital was all bit torrent, all piracy. And the other horror stories about games that would sell like 100,000 copies but have 2 million users because most people pirated it. And then Steam came along and introduced digital distribution and made digital distribution of legit games so convenient that most players moved away from power.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had all kinds of communities develop. And you could see there was the programming communities where people talked about programming. There was the news and events community. I was lived in the outskirts of Washington, D.C. That was like a big thing. But then there was like the pirate community where they were sharing pirated Apple II games and a very different community ethos and mantras out there, but all really nice and also very small. Your phone line couldn't take that many calls. And then later in the 1990s, the internet, which had been fostered in these colleges, started opening up for the public, and anybody could connect to it. And suddenly the world took on in life of its own. It became much, much easier to reach a global audience faster.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a funny thing. It started out as this defense department research project called the ARPANET, the Advanced Research Project Agency Network. And it was kind of like this revered secret thing. Became more and more open as the connected universities. Universities connected to the internet in the mid-1980s. And so if you're at a prestigious institution with access to computers, you could get on there. But a consumer back then, we just had these modems. This thing you plug into your phone line and it dials up on phone number and then it sounds wild sound effects over the telephone line to send digital signals back and forth. And these were really slow. The first modem I had was 300 boys. That means 30 characters per second of data. So you're like sitting there watching a sentence, like slowly emerge character by character as you're going online. But yeah, that's how we got online and we talked with each other. So you dial up to a local board. You'll be run by a person. Usually they have a computer or two sitting in their kitchen or something that's running the bulletin board. And they have a small community of a few hundred users all competing to connect to that one phone line. It was often busy.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and something we aim to do more and more folio over time in the course of building Fortnite, we've built a lot of other tools that are useful for us too because it's not just a game powered by Unreal Engine, but it's also a social ecosystem where people can make friends and voice chat and get together and parties. We've opened up all of those social features into epic online services and we give them away to all developers for free because we all benefit from growth in that user base. And our goal is ultimately to build the company's products and the same technology that we share with everybody else and to hope that foster a bigger and bigger ecosystem over time where everybody benefits.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between us building a game and us building a tools that were widely used by others was a critical part of that. And I think that's the sole reason that EPIC has been massively successful. And actually the reason that we've survived all of this time is that by serving both creators and gamers, we've been able to weather the ups and downs of the game industry. It's a brutal place for companies. We've been able to survive every financial downturn. Sometimes the engine's been funding the business because we didn't have a game and sometimes games have been funding the business. And it really set a principle in our culture that's persevered and is continually brought to their forefront.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it was a bunch of learnings emerged really quickly there. The neat thing I did with ZZT was I didn't just release the game. I also released the editor with it. I built this tool so I could make these ZZT boards that people could play, but I also gave it to all of the players themselves. And 30 years later, I still run into people when I go to a game industry event. It was like, you know, I grew up playing ZZT. And here's an adult who grew up playing my game. And it was because it enabled anybody to become a creator too. It had, you know, this old board editor and it also had a little scripting language so you could learn a little bit of programming in it too. And it kind of impressed and it really set a formative principle of epic, which was that the company's mission is to make awesome entertainment, but also awesome tools and to share those tools with everybody so they can build their own amazing things too. And when we got into Unreal Engine a few years later, the interplay”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If Effect does games good enough, we could accomplish what they have accomplished with operating systems. And the sky was the limit. And I think this is the age we live in now. You don't have to be an industrialist manufacturing physical product. Anybody who builds anything digitally, if it's good enough, you can reach the entire world and build the next Microsoft or Meta or Apple or Google or Epic Games.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I looked at money just as a tool to help you fund accomplishing core things. And having enough to do the things you want to do is the critical core thing. It's always been just very utilitarian. But the knowledge that other people all around the country and then a month later all around the world were playing the game, that was mind-boggling. This little kid who'd put out a game on a local board could be doing international business and chipping disks all over the world to players because the software is spreading on its own was just magical. And that was a new thing for software. That did not happen with mechanical devices. You manufactured one, you sold it to somebody and they had it and that was it. But software could spread. That was just really cool to see and it made me realize there's really no upward limit on the potential for a business like that. You know, we saw Microsoft is the big juggernaut company at the time, but I was like, hey, you know.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there is a natural tendency of the software to spread. I decided to use the sharer model. So I didn't just build this one game. I built a trilogy of three games. Released the first one for free, and I said, Hey, if you like this, buy the two sequels. I included my parents' mailing address and said, you know, send us $30 and you can get the sequel to this game. And the check started coming in within a few days. I was making like getting three or four orders a day. I was making like $100 a day. I'm like, whoa, I'm rich. Because, you know, being a 20-year-old that was like a pretty big deal.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had to force myself not to tell them what they needed to do, right? Because I really wanted to learn if they were able to discover it all for themselves. Today we would call this a user experience test. And there's a whole field of research around user experience research. But back then it was just inviting some kids over to play the game. I took notes about what they... Got stuck on and what they enjoyed, and where they felt bored, and just iteratively polished the game until I felt it was good. And I put it out and released it on, well, this was before the internet. So there were boarding boards. I uploaded it to a bunch of local bulletin boards. And from there, it started spreading because the way to build up cred for bulletin board users was to upload new files and to claim that, hey, I was the first that brought this to you.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be moving objects that could fly around the screen. And so this text editor I made evolved into a little game editor, so I was building these levels for a game. I put a lot of time into building an editor in a primitive set of objects, about 20 or 30 different objects, enough to build a really cool and compelling game, but not so many that players would lose track of what they're seeing. I started off just building different game levels. You know, the idea is you'd be on a series of boards. They'd be connected by going north the end of the current board would take you to a new one if it was open or maybe it was blocked and you couldn't go there. I built a sole game world around that. And, you know, this was the game that became ZCT. And I was having fun with it, building it and playing it. But I didn't know if it would really work. So I did this experiment. I started inviting neighbors over, like some adults, some kids of all different ages, and sat them down from it and said, like, here's a game I made. Figure it out.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a funny project because I didn't start out to build a video game. I just moved from an Apple II, so my brother bought my family an Apple II right after I'd visit him in California. So I've done programming on that for a few years, learned a lot of techniques, but there weren't many Apple II users around still by the time that cycle came to an end. So I just got in an IBM PC of my own. I was learning to program and I realized I needed to text editor. So I started writing a text editor. You know, a text editor is a program, a text edit text file is you have logic to move the curse around and let people type things and backspace and delete and do all of those mundane actions. And one night I was like, I'd finish it up and I was like, well, okay, I have a text editor, but this is pretty boring. And so I made the cursor into a smiley face character. And I had the different characters you could place in this document, perform different gameplay actions. Some would be walls and some would kill you and some would...”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And go north. How do you make that sentence into an actual series of commands on the computer? And that was really, really exciting. I have to say, until the time that Fortnite came out, I played video games primarily to learn what they were doing so that I could go off and do it myself. I sit down when Wolfenstein came out and then Doom came out. I'd go through and look at it pixel by pixel. I'd move the mouse very slightly and look at my piece.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather than realistic graphics. And in the other game that really got immersed in was Zork, which was a text adventure game. It would tell you where you are and what you see and you type in commands like gunorth or pickup sword or open door and explore a world that way. So the game didn't have any graphics, but in your mind you had this elaborate picture of what you were seeing there. It really brought in and inspired imagination more than other things. And playing those games led me to often want to learn to program everything I saw there. And that drove a lot of my programming. I learned how to move a player around the screen. I learned how to build a design tool so I could build castles and save them off and then play them in a game. And I realized there was a separation between the tools that you use to build a game and the game itself and that if the more powerful tools you had, the more creativity you could unleash in yourself or others. And I learned all the programming techniques that supported games, how to parse text. Pick up”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had a funny relationship with games because my real aspiration Always been to program cool stuff. I get more enjoyment of programming than anything else in the world. And so, you know, my first really two formative experience with games were playing this game called Adventure for the Atari 2600. It was like, you move this dot around the screen and picked up objects like swords and fought dragons and invaded castles and solved puzzles. Very, very simple iconic stuff.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody was entrepreneurial, like everybody had a side gig. Sometimes you go around and mow people's lawns or you'd, you know, rake the leaves up and earn money. And the freedom there and the organic learning that occurred there, I think it's something that is really critical to the American experience. I worry is increasingly going away as society is ever more protective and sheltering and makes it harder to get these experiences.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, we go out and we play and we do all sorts of things. We'd explore the woods. We'd build go-karts. We'd salvage old pieces of electronics and build what we thought were our spacecraft control panels for the spaceships we were building as play. And we'd have an enormous amount of freedom. And from basically being a little kid through the time I went off to college, it had an enormous amount of free time. Some people just used that and waste it and watch TV. Some people socialized. And some people really got into serious projects. So many people at all times were doing cool things. I was programming. I was learning to build things. Before I was releasing games to the world, I'd be like having neighborhood folks over to play the things I was working on and check them out. And sometimes they're impressed and sometimes they weren't. And they'd have their own project. And often we'd have spare time jobs.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think this is something that's kind of changing in America so much focus on grades and homework and structure around kids' lives. When I was growing up, my mom would feed me in my neighbor's, my neighbors and moms would feed them breakfast and they'd be like, well, be back by dark.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Proof, but like, you know, companies that are focused on just building great products and doing great things gravitate towards people who do the great work.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you learn any engineering discipline, you learn massive amounts of math and you learn the rigor of problem solving, you know, not just what you find from the Wikipedia article, but going through all of the exercises of solving complex problems and building up series of solutions to derive an answer, it's valuable and it embodies the knowledge that you need as a programmer. And people often go to university and think, okay, my goal here is to get good grades so I get a diploma and I prove to an employer that I'm valuable. No, that's just kind of the superficial bookkeeping of the university. The real purpose of all of this is to learn and whether you learn formally or you learn on your own. It's the learnings that are really valuable in a career. And especially if you're going to be entrepreneurial, it's really knowing the stuff that matters and not having the diplomas. There's ever more pressure to rebuild society more and more around credentials. Do you have the certificate? Do you have that?”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found an engineering degree and then never working in an engineering field, just being a computer programmer was immensely valuable. I went to the University of Maryland, Twitch for some disciplines, it's kind of known as a party school, but they work the engineers to death, worked really hard.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eigenvalue. Don't know what the hell this is. But it turns out eigenvectors and eigenvalues were the critical breakthrough that made the Google search engine technology work and stand apart from the rest because they found if you threw all the links that exist in the web and links from in two different sites and you put them in a giant matrix and you include it you found a dominant eigenvalues then those eigenvectors described the best search results for different things and so constantly picking up knowledge and looking for ways to put together is the thing to do. And if you aspire to be a programmer you've got to write a lot of code and you've got to continually learn new things and improve. If you want to be an artist you've got to continually draw artwork of all styles and all kinds and constantly push yourself to learn more and more because you never know exactly what you're going to end up doing in the long run but the more knowledge you have and the more skills the more chance you have putting it together.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, and constantly striving to make connections between these fields and look for their applications. Long after I chipped on Unrealington, it was like going back through an engineering textbook and looking at, oh yeah, I use that. I use that. And then I got to the section on it.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, so suddenly, like the karate kid, you know, you get to paint the fence and wax the car and suddenly put all the pieces together into. A 3D engine based on a whole lot of accumulated programming language and math knowledge. Often knowledge gained without ever anticipating that I might use it in that way”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are definitely karate good moments because all this time I was learning math in high school and in college. I studied mechanical engineering and so you learn all kinds of math. Vector calculus and vector math and matrices and all these related fields, physics and stress and strain and how to deal with complex physical systems. I wasn't really sure how engineers would actually make use of that knowledge. Do you just like forget about it when you actually go off to do work or is it, do you write down equations on paper? It was actually not clear as an early engineering student what you do. Started writing the first generation Unreal Engine and I was dealing with 3D mass. I was like, wait, I know this stuff I learned this.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later essential. In 1991, I released my first game, and over the course of that decade, we went from zero commercial releases to the first generation Unreal Engine. But this was largely just using the knowledge that I'd built up over the previous decade, just doing fun hobby projects. And if I hadn't done all that work, there's no way I could have ever built the things that came later”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, it's not just ours, it's really striving to learn To understand what knowledge you have, what knowledge you lack, and to continually experiments and work on projects that improve your knowledge base. And I didn't do this with a great amount of structure or planning. I was rather just going from project to project, doing things that I thought would be fun and cool. And with each project, I learned new things, learning about how to store and manage data, learning how to deal with advanced data structures, how to write complex programs that have deeply nested data and control flow. Each one of those provide a lesson which”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different people with their own personalities and themes. And so I spent a lot of time building a board and board program and learning how to deal with database management and user interface and dealing with multiple users concurrently and things. And so I probably found about 10 or 15,000 hours writing code just on my own as a kid between like age 10 and age 20 before I actually shipped a program to the outside world.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in the early days, I wrote a little bit of everything. I wrote some games. The first game I wrote on the Apple II was, since I only knew how to program in text mode, the computer would throw asterisks across the screen. They'd flow from left to right, and you'd have a parenthesis on the right-hand side of the screen. And it looks like a baseball mitt. And you're supposed to catch asterisks. That was my very first game. It took about a couple hours to build and tune. And it went from there, but I built a lot of things. I built databases at different points. I built a programming language and a full compiler for a language like Pascal because I didn't know where you went to buy one of those. So I made my own. And one of the things of, one of the fun things of that time was bulletin boards. Before we had the internet in the hands of consumers, you used your modem and you dialed into a local phone number and connected to whoever was running the computer there. And every town or city had hundreds of these bulletin boards run by”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny. I have a perfectly vivid memory of all the first things I learned to program. I have a hard time remembering people's names, but like code really sticks with me. Every step and every challenge, there were lessons learned. You know, some of which I've come to realize were just like me getting over some learning hurdles, but other things were actually shortcomings of programming languages and the realization that there are actually better ways. And what a programmer is learning to program for the first time. You know, a lot of what they're facing isn't the challenge of learning a new art. It's the friction introduced by failures of programming language design. And so I've constantly come back to those early lessons there as I've progressed and done more and more things, including building programming languages.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather Steve Sweeney, who was 16 years older than me, and at some point when I was a little kid, he went off to work in California for a tech company, and he'd gotten one of the first IBM PCs. And so for one summer, I think I was about 11, I went to visit him in California, my first trip away from my family just to hang out with him. And he had this brand new IBM computer, and I learned to program over the course of a few days in basic. And I was just blown away with the capabilities of computers at the time. It was unbelievable what they could accomplish. I was hooked from that point onward and very much wanted to be a programmer.”
2025-04-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source