Epic Manygames

In 1991 a man named Tim Sweeney released an adventure game called ZZT. A charming and weird shareware game, it was successful enough to launch a new company called Epic Megagames, which would ultimately be responsible for the high-end Unreal engine and such games as Gears of War. The forces that took the creators of ZZT and Jazz Jackrabbit into making joyless games about impossibly beefy men wielding chainsaw-guns would be worthy of examination in their own right. An examination of that history, however, might miss the elements of design and community that developer and author Anna Anthropy focuses on in her fascinating book about Epic's first game.