Potomac Computer Systems
Tim Sweeney was born in 1970 and raised in Potomac, Maryland. In 1991 he founded a company called Potomac Computer Systems, operating out of his parents' house, with the intention of doing consulting work and selling utility software. The first product was not a game. It was a text editor written in Pascal — the kind of tool a programmer builds because the existing tools annoy him.
What happened next is the part that gets retold, because it inverts the usual order of things. Sweeney kept extending the editor. He added the ability to move a character around the editing area. He added objects the character could interact with. At some point the extensions stopped being features of a text editor and started being a game, and the game was the thing worth shipping. ZZT was released in 1991: a top-down adventure rendered entirely in ASCII characters, distributed as shareware.
A hundred dollars a day
ZZT's significance is not aesthetic. It is an ASCII game in a year when Wolfenstein 3D was months away. Its significance is that it worked as a business. ZZT earned roughly $100 a day in shareware registrations — not a fortune, but enough, in 1991, to establish that making games could be a career rather than a hobby. Sweeney fulfilled the mail orders himself, with his father helping to handle the envelopes.
The other thing ZZT shipped with was its editor — the ancestor it had grown out of. Players could build their own ZZT worlds and script object behaviour in a small built-in language, and they did, in volume. The pattern Sweeney established with his first product — ship the game, ship the tools that made it, let the players build — is the pattern Epic would still be following decades later, at a scale ZZT's author could not have projected from a farmhouse in Maryland.
Epic MegaGames
In early 1992 Sweeney renamed the company Epic MegaGames. The name was aspirational to the point of comedy — the company was one person — and Sweeney has been candid that the "Mega" was there to make a one-man shareware operation look like a real publisher to the retailers and developers he wanted to work with. It worked. Mark Rein, previously at id Software, joined shortly afterwards and has been Epic's vice president ever since.
The company grew through the shareware era by publishing other people's games alongside its own, then moved its headquarters to Cary, North Carolina in 1999 and dropped the "MegaGames" to become Epic Games. By then Sweeney had built the thing that would define the company's second act: the Unreal Engine, written for Unreal (1998) and licensed to outside studios almost immediately. The engine business turned out to be larger and more durable than the game business that had produced it — which, for a company founded on a text editor that turned into a game, was an unusually consistent outcome.