Epic Games: The Dorm Room Coder Who Built Unreal Engine, Reinvented Gaming With Unreal Tournament And Gears Of War, And Made Fortnite A Cultural Empire Worth $32 Billion

In 1991, a twenty-year-old Tim Sweeney mailed floppy disks of ZZT from his parents' house in Maryland. Seven years later, Unreal redefined what a first-person shooter could look like. Then came Unreal Tournament, Gears of War, Infinity Blade, and finally a sixty-day pivot called Fortnite Battle Royale that generated $5.6 billion in a single year. This is the story of how one obsessive engineer built the engine that now powers half the games on earth — and then used it to pick the most audacious legal fight in the history of the industry.