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Epic Games announced at the Korea Games Conference that the developer kit for its popular Unreal graphics engine will soon “generate iOS applications.” In other words, one of the most popular and advanced 3D engines used by console and PC video games will soon be used to produce graphically impressive iPhone iPod touch and iPad games.
Epic demonstrated a tech demo game running the Unreal engine called Epic Citadel [iTunes link] at Apple’s event unveiling the new iPod touch earlier this month, then made the demo available as a free download from the App Store. The demo has since been downloaded one million times, so the unprecedented graphics must have impressed iPhone and iPod-wielding gamer geeks.
Apple has been trying to make the iPod touch and the iPhone the biggest and best portable gaming devices, and depending on how you measure success, the company might have done just that. Casual games and remastered classics have performed well on the platform, and Apple just launched an Xbox Live -like social gaming platform called Game Center.
Epic Games revealed its iOS developer kit plans because it recognizes the potential of the smartphone gaming market. It also revealed that it is running the engine on the Android platform, but it didn’t say when or if that platform would be publicly supported in the developer kit.

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Do Unreal and iOS Match?

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First introduced with the 1998 PC game Unreal, the Unreal engine has since been used for dozens and dozens of popular games on virtually every major platform, from Xbox to Wii to PlayStation 3. Hit games that have used the Unreal engine include Gears of War , BioShock, Mass Effect , Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3, Red Steel , Mirror’s Edge, Deus Ex , Borderlands  and several Harry Potter franchise games.
The iPhone is better known for casual games such as Diner Dash, Plants vs Zombies  and Angry Birds. Those games are cheaper to develop and arguably have broader appeal than the hardcore, gamer-culture titles the Unreal engine is best known for. While a few graphics-intensive, “hardcore” games like NOVA and Madden NFL 11 have been successful on the platform, it remains to be seen whether there is a large market for console-style games that take large teams and money coffers to develop.
Epic Games hasn’t announced the licensing costs or other practical details behind Unreal engine development for iOS, but it did reveal in vague terms what kind of effort it took to produce Epic Citadel; a “small team” created the technology, while “the demo content was almost entirely the work of Principal Artist Shane Caudle, who created the Citadel in just eight weeks.” Caudle received some on-the-side help from the QA department and other team members as needed.
There haven’t been enough big success stories to date to prove that $5 games are a reliable bet for high-end 3D game development, but if Epic is able to make the tools easy to use for small teams and keep the licensing and development costs very low, we could see some very technically impressive games on Apple’s mobile devices in the near future.
 
Written by Samuel Axon