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FWIW, most games before early 2000s built all their tooling from scratch as there wasn't off the shelf engines to use. Unreal engine came out in 98 and Source in 2004

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Jedi Knight 2 came out in 2002 and the original Call of Duty came out in 2003, both running heavily modified versions of John Carmack's Quake III engine

Valve originally started in 1996 by licensing the Quake engine for Half-Life.

id sold a few Doom and a bunch of Quake 1/2/3 licenses back in the day. Off the top of my head: Heretic and Hexen used the Doom engine, their sequels used the Quake and Quake 2 engines respectively. Strife was an FPS RPG that was Doom based. Half-Life started out as a HEAVILY modified Quake engine and rumor has it that there is still a bit of Quake code in Source. Duke Nukem Forever started out on Quake before moving to Unreal.

Call of Duty and Medal of Honor both used id Tech 3 (aka the Quake 3 engine), as did some of the Star Wars games, etc. Unfortunately, The Source Engine came out around the time of id Tech 4, and it really took the reins, with Unreal Engine hitting a stride thereafter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_3#Games_using_a_propri...

I heard an interview about Doom port to hmm 3DO? and it cost them one time payment of $50K cash money to outright buy Doom assets + game engine license.

There were game engines in the 90s -- Quake Engine, Build Engine, Unreal Engine.. to name some of the popular ones.

You also had GoldSrc, a modified Quake Engine for Half-Life 1.

Many companies created their own and was not available outside the business. Dark Engine used in the Thief:Dark Project games is an example. Think of companies like Nintendo having their own engine which powered games like Mario 64 and, I believe, Ocarina of Time was a modified version of that.

The "off the shelf" engines available at that time (like Unreal or Quake engine) might have been decent for certain type of games.

Today, you could say many games could be done with Unity, Godot, or Unreal. There are still companies today using their own.

Wasn’t Quake 1 reasonably off the shelf for its time? Released in ‘96, it did have a map editor and a number of games were built with it.

Source itself being built from Quake 1…

idTech 2 was specifically built for Quake 1, and only later it was licensed to other developers as well. So it was not an off-the shelf solution id could simply take for building Quake. It was tailored for that game.

They specifically built Quake to sell the engine. They knew it would be difficult to actually sell an engine without a successful title.

Quake 3 was probably the first time the id really built a game to demonstrate an engine for the sake of engine sales. And then again with Rage.

Interesting, I’ve never heard about that. Do you have a source?

I don't think they specifically understood the idea of a "game engine" as the core product at the time. But there are plenty of references if you Google a bit that Quake was designed for modders due to the popularity of DOOM mods - so developer experience was absolutely taken into account from the start.

They had already done licensing deals for the DOOM engine at that point, including the greatest game of all time "Chex Quest."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest

Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate it from the engine code so modders could easily make new games without needing access to the full engine source. (And QuakeC was supposed to be simpler as a language than C, which it... is, but at the cost of weird compromises like a single number type (float) which is also used to store bitfields by directly manipulating power of two values. Which works, of course, until your power of 2 is big enough to force the precision to drop below 1...)

Keep in mind that they had developed a good relationship with Raven Software and made a good chunk of money off of their use of idTech 1 for Heretic.

Won't really work on consoles like PS1 and PS2.

I think some of the early FPS engines were re-used, with Rise of the Triad using the Wolfenstein 3d one.

Engines that come to mind: XnGine (Daggerfall, Terminator, ...), Dark Engine (Thief, System Shock 2), Build (Duke 3D, Blood...). Yes, they existed before the 2000s, but the difference to today is that there were many engines being reused for a handful of games at most. Today it's few engines running most games.

Battlefield, gta, alan wake, ms flightsim, cyberpunk, hogsward (unreal) all top games with different engines. Agree that unreal engine has many games, but plenty of alternatives

That's a pretty small selection of well-known AAA games. Those few examples really don't change the general skew towards using 3rd party engines these days vs. few games doing something like that in the 90s. And in fact, most of these engines have also been reused between games (with heavy modifications of course - e.g. Remedy's Northlight engine has been evolving since Alan Wake 1).

Build engine duke nukem also used in many other games like blood etc. Same for quake engine. Even doom engine was used in games like hexen. Doom was also an evolution of the wolfenstein engine. Quake 1 to later quake engines all evolutions and used in a lot of other games. These are all 3d engines. On the nes, snes and sega machines the same platform engine was reused in 1000s of games. Same for sound engines, physics engines etc. My point is. I dont think there is a lot of difference. Innovation still happening today. Not everything is Unreal.

> On the nes, snes and sega machines the same platform engine was reused in 1000s of games.

No, this isn't true. Almost all games were bespoke back in that era - the machines simply weren't powerful enough to allow for competitive, flexible game engines. An individual development house might have a code library or base that they'd iterate on, but there was little sharing between different companies (much less reuse by the thousands).

By the 16-bit era sound engines did tend to be widely reused, though (e.g. GEMS).

Honestly it seems like it always has: there are a handful of dev houses using their own engine for a spread of games (e.g. EA with Frostbite, Ubi with Anvil, Rockstar with RAGE, Bungie with whatever they call the Halo/Destiny engine these days), then UE or Unity are out there mass licensed for a whole bunch of stuff, then the few less widely licensed engines like Source.

That's not how it always has been. Licensing engines was virtually unknown 30 years ago (and when it happened at all it was within a very narrow range for making games in the same genre, more like asset swaps and level packs than outright new games), and new and exciting in the '00s.

Yeah sorry I meant from, like, 2000-ish and on.

I wanted to mention the odd adventure game Normality as using the Doom engine, but I can't find a source

I'm pretty sure Normality ran on the in-house Gremlin Interactive engine that powered the excellent Realms of the Haunting.

+1 for the Daggerfall mention. I haven't thought about that game in 1000 years and loved it.

You’ve reminded me of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It was very limited in terms of maps and possible multiplayer only. It was fantastic.

That reminds me of how Torque [0] debuted in 2001 using Tribes 2.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_(game_engine)

Torque was pretty instrumental in kick-starting my career. Glad it's still being maintained to this day (despite it arguably getting steamrolled by unity and mismanagement).

That's not quite true. There were plenty of 90s game engines. They just weren't as general purpose. So you would end up rewriting a good chunk anyways to get what you wanted.

They managed to do this to Quake.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGknUiihpkI

id Tech engines, Renderware and a few other big ones were for sure available at the time and used. Earlier, during 90's was another situation however.

The Quake 3 engine was incredibly popular in the early 2000s.

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