#467 – Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Tim Sweeney, a legendary video game programmer, founder, and CEO of Epic Games that created many incredible games and technologies, including the Unreal Engine and Fortnite, which both revolutionized the video game industry and the experience of playing and creating video games. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for AI fueled note taking, MasterClass for learning, Shopify for selling stuff, a g one for nutrition, and Element for electrolytes. Choose
I had a brother, Steve Sweeney, who, 16 years older than me. And, at some point when I was a little kid, he went off, to work in California for a tech company, and he'd gotten one of the first IBM PCs. So for one summer, I think I was about 11, I went to visit him in California. It's my first, like, trip away from my family just to hang out with him. And he had this brand new IBM computer, and I I learned to program over the course of a few days in basic. I was just blown away with the capabilities of computers at the time. It was unbelievable what they could accomplish, and, I was just hooked
Do you remember what you wrote in BASIC? Is it a video game type thing? Is it, like, four loop, some numerical thing? What do you remember?
Yeah. It's funny. I I have a perfectly vivid memory of all of the first things I learned to program. Okay. I have a hard time remembering people's names, but, like, code really sticks with me. Every step and every challenge, there were lessons learned. And, you know, some of which I've I've come to realize were just like me, getting over some learning hurdles. But other things were actually shortcomings of programming languages, and the realization that there are actually better ways than what a programmer is learning to program for the first time. You know, a lot of what they're facing isn't
Yeah. The friction and the pain is is the guide to learning in programming. Okay. If I were to describe programming journey, that would be marked by pain. And that pain, you you shouldn't escape the pain. The pain is instructive for you to understand programming languages. But do you do you remember what kind of stuff you were writing, at that time, just the early programs? Yeah.
In the early days, I wrote a little bit of everything. I wrote some games. The first game I wrote on the Apple two was, since I only knew how to program in text mode, the computer would, throw asterisks across the screen. They'd flow from left to right, and you'd have a parenthesis on the right hand side of the screen and, you know, look like a baseball mitt, and you're supposed to catch the asterisks. That was that was my very first game. It took about a couple hours, to build and tune, and I went from there. But I built a lot of things. I built databases at different points. I built a progra
Ten to fifteen thousand hours. What was the value of the hours as a kid you put in in programming that led to the success you've had in later life? Maybe this is by way of advice to younger people in terms of how they allocate the hours of their early life.
Yeah. You know, it's not just hours. It's really striving to learn, to understand what knowledge you have, what knowledge you lack, and to continually do experiments and work on projects that improve your knowledge base. And I didn't do this with a great amount of structure or planning. I was rather just going from project to project doing things that I thought would be fun and cool. And with each project, I learned ne
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