Tim Sweeney

According to Forbes, as of May 2020, he has a net worth of $4.5 billion. However, Bloomberg estimates his wealth at $9.7 billion.

In 2019, he was named Person of the Year by British video game industry trade magazine MCV. He was also a finalist in The News & Observer's Tar Heel of the Year award.

Sweeney received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 17th Game Developers Choice Awards.

In February 2012, Sweeney was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) Hall of Fame for changing "the face of gaming with the advent of the Unreal Engine and the commitment of Epic, as a studio, to bring both consumer and industry-facing technology to new heights."

Since the real estate collapse in 2008, Sweeney has used his fortune to purchase large tracts of land in North Carolina, with the intention of preserving biodiversity. As of December 2019, he has salvaged 50,000 acres of forest land in the state, including the Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre natural area that contains more than 130 rare and threatened plants and wildlife species. Sweeney, who had paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, donated the conservation easement to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, after winning a condemnation lawsuit filed by a power company who planned to build a transmission line through the land.

Wired magazine awarded him a Rave Award in 2007 for his work on Unreal Engine 3, the technology behind the blockbuster Gears of War.

Following ZZT, Sweeney started working on his next title, Jill of the Jungle, but found that he lacked the skills to complete this alone. He formed a team of four people to complete the game by mid-1992. For continued development, Sweeney sought out a business partner for Epic MegaGames, eventually coming to Mark Rein, who had just been let go from id Software. Rein helped with growing and managing the company; due to the company's growth, Sweeney did not end up getting his degree, short by one credit. Sweeney would later work on the Unreal Engine, used in the 1998 first-person shooter Unreal and multiple other video games. With the success of Unreal, the company relocated to North Carolina in 1999, and changed its name to Epic Games.

Sweeney attended the University of Maryland starting around 1989, where he studied mechanical engineering, though he was still fascinated by computers. Around this time, his father, who worked for the Defense Mapping Agency, gave him an IBM Personal Computer/AT. Sweeney established a consulting business, Potomac Computer Systems, out of his parents' home to offer help with computers, but it never took off and he shelved the company. Later, Sweeney had the idea of creating games that could be sold, programming them at night or over weekends outside college work. This first required him to create a text editor based on the PASCAL language to be able to program the game, which led to the idea of making a game out of the text editor itself. This became the basis of ZZT. He let college friends and those around his neighborhood to try it and give feedback, and was aware it was something he could sell to other computer users. To distribute the game, Sweeney looked to the shareware model, and wrote to Scott Miller of Apogee Software, Ltd., a leading shareware producer at the time, for ideas on how to distribute ZZT. He revitalized Potomac Computer Systems for selling ZZT, fulfilling mail orders with help of his father. ZZT sold well enough, a few copies each day that came to about US$100 per day, that Sweeney decided to make developing games his career. Recognizing he needed a better name for a video game company, he renamed Potomac Computer Systems to Epic MegaGames.

Timothy Dean Sweeney (born 1970) is an American video game programmer, billionaire businessman and conservationist, known as the founder and CEO of Epic Games, and the creator of the Unreal Engine, a game development platform.

Sweeney was raised in Potomac, Maryland, the youngest of three brothers. At a young age, he had become interested in tinkering with mechanical and electrical devices, and stated he had taken apart a lawnmower as early as 5 or 6, and later built his own go-kart. He became interested in arcade games when they began to become popular in the late 1970s, knowing that like the mechanics devices he took apart and repaired, there were those that had programmed the games in the machines. Though the family got an Atari 2600, Sweeney was not as interested in the games for that, outside of Adventure, and later said he had not played many video games in his life and very few to completion.