Former Epic director is building a European rival to the Unreal and Unity game engines — 'The Immense Engine' dev sees opportunity for AI agents to 'do the work of ten or fifteen people'

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Dev team are aiming for an engine that is 'fully European-hosted, built by Europeans, and complies with European rules and guidelines.'

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A heavyweight games industry veteran says he is building a fully European alternative to popular game engines from American and Chinese companies. Arjan Brussee shared the plans in an interview hosted by the De Technoloog podcast (Dutch), reports the Video Games Chronicle.

Dutchman Brussee has some serious games industry credentials. His stint at Epic Games was split over two eras, the first one, which saw him programming the Jazz Jackrabbit games in the 90s. Then, from 2018 to 2023, Brussee returned to Epic as the global director of product management for Unreal Engine. Between those eras, Brussee became the co-founder of Guerrilla Games from 2003 (Killzone franchise), and Boss Key Productions from 2012.

The Immense Engine, a European alternative

Most readers will be familiar with game engines like Unreal and Unity (the latter was founded in Denmark but relocated to San Francisco in 2009). Brussee reckons that a European game engine will rival these offerings and alternatives from the Chinese, but The Immense Engine will be “fully European-hosted, built by Europeans, and complies with European rules and guidelines.”

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Having a Europe-first game engine could be a boon for 3D simulations in defense or logistics on the continent. If it is built to adhere to the aforementioned European rules and guidelines, this could broaden its adoption in big government and local government projects, too.

Work already is underway with The Immense Engine, and other than gaming, it is clearly being developed with practical representations of 3D worlds in mind. We recently reported on the Japanese local government using U.S. game engines for large civil engineering projects, so Brussee is thinking along similar lines.

There has to be an AI angle

Software coding and AI are inevitably going to be further intertwined going forward, and Brussee embraces rather than shuns this trend. In the podcast interview, he said he sees opportunities with the rise of AI, especially by making the most of fewer human resources.

“If you are smart and know how to put a good framework of AI agents to work, you can do the work of ten or fifteen people,” noted the game industry veteran. Brussee strongly suggests the use of AI agents in developing the engine, but whether that means there will be AI tools built into The Immense Engine remains to be seen.

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Mark Tyson
Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ekio
    If he wants to be trouble free in the future, he better do it in Rust.
    I like the ambition but I hope he’s not planning to make is as bloated as UE. The bloat of this engine is catastrophic.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    Brussee strongly suggests the use of AI agents in developing the engine,

    UE has sucked for ages now but i never thought an ai slop engine would make it look better.
    Reply
  • gamerk316
    ekio said:
    If he wants to be trouble free in the future, he better do it in Rust.
    I like the ambition but I hope he’s not planning to make is as bloated as UE. The bloat of this engine is catastrophic.
    Rust has the tradeoff of lower performance versus C; that's why pretty much *everything* performance sensitive is written in C, because the more protections you put in place, the more performance you lose.
    Reply
  • chaos215bar2
    hotaru251 said:
    UE has sucked for ages now but i never thought an ai slop engine would make it look better.
    This. At a minimum, the industry hasn't even begun to grapple with the question of maintaining AI-written software. This sounds like a great way to wind up with a convoluted engine no one quite understands utterly riddled with technical debt.
    Reply
  • das_stig
    chaos215bar2 said:
    This. At a minimum, the industry hasn't even begun to grapple with the question of maintaining AI-written software. This sounds like a great way to wind up with a convoluted engine no one quite understands utterly riddled with technical debt.
    or chance to build from the ground up and keep to strict set of guidelines and principles, which Ai benefits from but in the end, the code should always be reviewed by a human for efficiency, clarity and quality and this is what most companies like Microsoft are failing on.
    Reply
  • chaos215bar2
    das_stig said:
    or chance to build from the ground up and keep to strict set of guidelines and principles
    Practically the entire concept agentic genAI software development driving this is literally months old and in an extremely unstable state of flux. And you think anyone's come up with a strict set of guidelines and principles for how it should be used on a long-term project?

    😂

    This is the kind of thing that takes like a decade of real-world experience to build up. A few early projects will be lucky, get things at least mostly right, and will wind up driving the guidelines the rest of the industry falls back on, but the vast majority of early projects going all-in on genAI development are more likely to wind up an unmaintainable mess within a few years.

    das_stig said:
    the code should always be reviewed by a human for efficiency, clarity and quality and this is what most companies like Microsoft are failing on.

    Yes. Microsoft. The paragon known throughout the industry for efficiency, clarity, and quality.

    🤣
    Reply
  • coolitic
    The first half of the headline had me a bit excited; then the rest of it clearly conveyed to me that the man does not have his priorities straight.
    Reply