Shack: A few weeks ago I was cleaning out my desk and I found the insert from the first Unreal with the note from designer CliffyB. It made me feel kinda old.

Tanya Jessen: I have these perfectly vivid images of playing Unreal in a LAN party with my high school crush. Or wait, was I in junior high? I think I was just about to enter high school.

To look back on that and to think that I'm working for that company--I played so much Unreal. It was the bleeding edge. You needed an uber-massive PC to run it, and you have to have a PC that had a 3Dfx card. It was so awesome.

I was still playing Duke Nukem 3D when it came out, so it made me buy a new computer. It's crazy to think that I work for this company now.

Shack: And to think that Unreal is still around, and Duke is still around in some form.

Tanya Jessen: It's great. All these franchises that get built--you can never get rid of Super Mario Bros. or Zelda. These are things that are just going to exist in people's livelihood forever and ever.

Shack: It seems like classic one-time PC franchises are starting to appear more and more often on consoles. How do you feel about the closing gap between PC and consoles?

Tanya Jessen: I think it's really great. Like I was talking about earlier, reaching out to the mainstream audience and introducing them--giving them the same kind of feeling that I had when I was playing Unreal so many years ago, which they may never have had.

I mean, we had Unreal Championship on Xbox and we had Unreal Tournament on Dreamcast. Being able to bring that to the mainstream and have them experience that has been what it's all about for us. We always want to include everything the hardcore loved about it but yet make it look really awesome and feel awesome and fast-paced.

We always said that we didn't want to change the formula for UT3. We knew it worked. There's so many shooters that have moved away from the super fast-paced shooter model.

I read a lot of comments on blogs about, "oh, it's just the same UT," but that's what makes it so great.

One of the cool things is that we were trying to take everything that we had learned, every iteration of a game we do on a console, this is a great thing about having a small company. The lessons that we learn from every game that we do gets moved to the next version.

One of the guys who did the control system for Gears worked on the control system for UT3. We knew that the controls for Gears just worked, and so we wanted to bring the same kind of feeling, even it's a completely different type of shooter, to UT.

Shack: With the Xbox 360 edition of UT3 packing two new characters and five new maps, are there any plans to release that content for the PC and PlayStation 3 versions?

Tanya Jessen: Right now, there's no plans to do that.

Shack: What are some of the favorite UT3 mods floating around the offices at Epic?

Tanya Jessen: Every time something really cool comes out, it goes around the office.

The one we absolutely love is the LEGO mod. It's amazing. It's got such a good use of the physics engine--the destructible environments, it's great.

Shack: I'm not sure if this was addressed in the latest patch, but while the mod support in the PS3 edition of UT3 is really nice, being able to only store mod on a memory stick at a time and being forced import them one at a time really annoying.

Are there any plans to fix that?

Tanya Jessen: I don't know if we fixed that or changed that. This is the thing I was talking about with community. We're very attuned to what's going on on our forums and the mail that gets sent in.

It's definitely one of those things where if people want it, then it's something that we will potentially feature. There are other things that we have our eyes on that we're looking to address.

Shack: Are there plans for more free community map packs?

Tanya Jessen: I can't really speak to that.

Shack: If there were going to be, would they still be free for the Xbox 360 edition?

Tanya Jessen: That's up to people that are higher up than me. It's a different model. I talked about the difference between an open platform and a closed platform.

One of the reasons that Xbox Live is so successful is because of the closed platform. But at the same time, you have to deal with that, the certification, the business model that Microsoft has built.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Registered users can use the HD Stream.

Shack: I actually can't imagine working at Epic. I don't understand how it just doesn't turn into a giant LAN party every day.

Tanya Jessen: It does become a giant LAN party, that's what's so great about it. There's guys that still play UT2K4.

The Xbox 360 edition of Unreal Tournament 3 arrives later this summer, with Gears of War 2 hitting the Xbox 360 exclusively in November.