User:Deniecew/sandbox

The term "game engine" arose in the mid-1990s, especially in connection with 3D games such as first-person shooters with a first-person shooter engine. Epic games, founded by developer Tim Sweeney, debuted Unreal Engine in the year 1998. Such was the popularity of Id Software's Doom and Quake games that, rather than work from scratch, other developers licensed the core portions of the software and designed their own graphics, characters, weapons and levels—the "game content" or "game assets". Separation of game-specific rules and data from basic concepts like collision detection and game entity meant that teams could grow and specialize.

Some middleware contains full source code, others just provide an API reference for a compiled binary library. Some middleware programs can be licensed either way, usually for a higher fee for full source code. The C++ programming language is most commonly used in the creation of today’s big name titles as well as indie games.