This episode of Web3s comes to you from sunny North Carolina, USA and so I couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to share with you one of my favourite companies in the world - Epic Games.

There’s so much to love about this company, whether it’s:

Tim Sweeney - the visionary founder and billionaire, who’s more likely to be found in Burger King than hanging out with other larger than life tech CEOs - and who is more than happy to challenge the status quo if it helps to create a more open and equitable internet…

or the awesome Unreal Engine which now powers thousands of the best 3D multiplayer games

or  global phenomenon that is Fortnite. 

What I love about Epic is how from the very beginning, they always looked to reduce friction and maximise fun and openness. 

I also love how his very first game ZZT is based on the idea of rooms… Which he shares in the following quote:

“I could turn this text editor into a little game. Similar to Atari Adventure, I based it on rooms. Each screen full of text became a room. I had different graphical characters represent different gameplay behaviours. Suddenly you could build a text document and hit the play button in this editor and now you’re up and running with your game.” 

Sweeney made ZZT available to customers with the first ‘room’ (disk 1) being completely free and if you enjoyed it, you could then buy 3 other rooms to play.  

This freemium type model was way before it’s time - as was the fact that you could edit the game to create your own rooms given that it was created via a text editor - so an early precursor to the creator games and platforms we now see exploding. 

So this episode is a big one and unfortunately means we are not going to hit that 3 minute marker with this one. 

But it’s definitely worth 7 minutes of your life. 

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, I would be honoured if you would subscribe to the podcast.