Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney on building Bullet Train and the future of virtual reality

Above: You can make time slow down in Bullet Train.

Image Credit: Epic Games

GamesBeat: Your company has been working with Oculus VR for a while now. Is it crazy to see how far it has come in just a few years? 

Sweeney: It’s very crazy. They move incredibly fast. That’s really the defining attribute of their success. They’ve gone through five or six major revisions of the hardware and numerous minor ones along the way. At every step, it’s gotten better and better. That is the way to build products in a rapidly evolving market like this. It can’t be — you can’t hold it back and keep it quiet for years and years until you’ve achieved perfection because the entire market would’ve moved ahead by then.

GamesBeat: It’s interesting that all the major VR headsets like PlayStation VR, HTC’s and Valve’s Vive, and the Rift will debut within a few months of each other next year. 

Sweeney: Yeah, that is the time. I think it’s going to [be] really big with consumers really quickly, potentially more quickly than anybody’s expecting.

GamesBeat: Since Unreal Engine 4 went free, have you heard much from developers using it for VR projects? 

Sweeney: Yeah, gosh. I guess you can’t hear numbers. But it’s a large fraction of the audience. They’re doing some of the most leading-edge stuff. VR is really — it’s being populated, especially [with] the early adopters. PC developers have somewhat of a high-end focus, and so we’re seeing some really amazing production values being brought to VR that way.

We’ve had over one million developers choose Unreal since we’ve made it free earlier this year at the [Game Developers Conference]. It’s really been a time of staggering growth for the Unreal Engine. This is by far our biggest engine year ever, and it’s still only September.

Above: Epic’s Showdown VR demo is available now to hype up Unreal’s capabilities with the next gen of gaming.

Image Credit: Epic Games

GamesBeat: After working on so many demos, is Epic any closer to figuring out how to make a full game for VR headsets? 

Sweeney: Absolutely. If you looked at how we started in previous engine generations, we always started out with a couple of years of tech demos to learn the possibilities of the hardware, to really push it forward, and build up our own understanding of what’s possible and what works really well. And all that knowledge is fed directly into our games. In the last generation, [we had] a couple of years of really leading-edge, high-end tech demos with dynamic lighting and other features leading up to the release of Gears of War.

All of the work we’re doing right now is feeding into our game development efforts. We’ve announced Fortnite and we’re shipping Unreal Tournament. But there is more coming. And some of it I think will really surprise people with the potential of … having games that are really seen as defining this next generation, spanning VR and high-end graphics in general.

GamesBeat: What’re your views on the future of VR?

Sweeney: I think it is the next big platform. VR as a display technology, as it’s miniaturized and made comfortable and mainstream, will be a replacement for all other forms of display technology, input and output. So for anybody who works with computers all day, this is going to be our future. That’s what I believe. Imagine how powerful and convenient it will be when it’s reduced to the size of your sunglasses. Everybody will have it with them all the time, and you’ll be able to get into — instead of pulling out your smartphone and having 15 degrees of your field of view occupied with this little digital experience, you’ll have the entirety of your visual space completely utilized by the technology.

It’ll be a vastly better experience than the highest end consoles and TVs and just as portable as today’s smartphones.