For Americans, following European news can feel like trying to follow a soccer game on your neighbor’s TV while in your own living room there are two simultaneous gunfights, a nu-metal concert, and someone revving 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 Europeans are just so over our BS, and are moving on—that’s the vibe anyway. Last month, for instance, the French government began a transition from Windows to Linux.
And now, the Dutch co-creator of the legendary 90s game Jazz Jackrabbit has a vision of a Europe unshackled by the Unreal Engine, a load-bearing pillar of the gaming world also used in other media, and he may just have the chops and experience to pull it off. Caution is probably merited, though, because he sounds well and truly AI-pilled.
As noticed by Video Games Chronicle, Arjan Brussee, the co-founder of Horizon: Zero Dawn studio Guerrilla Games appeared on the Dutch tech podcast De Technoloog earlier this week to talk about his project, “the Immense Engine,” an alternative piece of general purpose software that would theoretically provide a true alternative to Unreal Engine.
Unreal Engine is the software foundation of Fortnite most famously, but also of classics like Gears of War, Bioshock Infinite, Mass Effect, and Batman Arkham City. It’s also used in Hollywood productions like the Mandalorian and is even used to make popular Kids’ YouTube content. European game engines exist, notably Germany-based CryEngine, which is associated with the Far Cry games, but that’s mostly a first-person shooter engine, and has long struggled with adoption.
If anyone has the credibility to build Unreal-Engine-but-for-people-who-eat-muesli, it’s probably Brussee. He’s both a successful gaming entrepreneur in his own right, and has worked across multiple decades at Unreal Engine parent company Epic Games.
Some translated statements about his plans for the Immense Engine come from Video Games Chronicle (a U.K-based blog, so it’s not clear who or what actually translated them). Brussee apparently said, “No one is currently making an engine that is fully European-hosted, built by Europeans, and complies with European rules and guidelines.” He also hinted at a goal of Unreal-like generalizability, saying, “Creating usable 3D worlds is becoming increasingly important, certainly for purposes other than just gaming.”
But he apparently also claimed, “The rise of AI means that we need to approach the development of this kind of crucial software differently,” and “if you are smart and know how to put a good framework of AI agents to work, you can do the work of ten or fifteen people.” So the codebase for this project sounds like it will be heavily, um, AI-assisted. Maybe Brussee will use Mistral’s models, just to keep things European.
