Epic Games founder Mark Rein and designer Cliff Bleszinski voiced their support of the recently founded PC Gaming Alliance, suggesting that the consortium would help unite and revitalize the platform.

"Right now, if you have a laptop with integrated graphics and try to play our game, it doesn't play...So you just lose your interest in that. We don't want that," Rein told MTV Multiplayer. "We want all these people buying laptops and reasonably priced PCs, to at least be able to be exposed to gaming. They can go out later and upgrade to something better, but let’s at least give them a baseline experience."

Added Bleszinski, "I think everybody coming together in that kind of way will essentially kind of help re-glue things back together and kind of help fix the market."

Officially formed at last week's Game Developers Conference, the PCGA hopes to serve as a forum for developers to collaborate on the marketing, production, and analyzation of the PC market. The body will act as an advisory board, with a... Read more

Commenting on recent speculation that Microsoft may buy Unreal Tournament and Gears of War developer Epic Games for $1 billion this summer, Epic Games VP Mark Rein quipped that such an acquisition would be much more costly.

A recent editorial in GamePro suggested that Epic would be purchased by Microsoft for $1 billion by the summer. In a response emailed to Develop, Rein did not comment directly on the rumors of an acquisition but noted that his company was much more valuable than the suggested amount.

"I have not seen the actual GamePro article but if they're going to make predictions about us selling Epic we would prefer if they started at $2 billion because we don't want anyone thinking that we're cheap," joked Rein. A smiley affixed on the end of the statement was omitted in several reportings of the quote, leading ... Read more

The Unreal Man: Mark Rein Speaks is a Gamasutra interview with the Epic Games VP about Unreal Engine 3, PlayStation 3, Japanese developers working with Epic's technology, PC development and more.

Epic VP Mark Rein issued a short statement late tonight, confirming that a PC beta demo for his company's upcoming shooter Unreal Tournament 3 could be released as early as this week.

"The development team feels they're pretty close to being ready to release this," said Rein on the Epic forums, "so it could come out this week but for safety sake I'd say it should be out within two weeks."

According to Rein, the beta will feature standard online play, as well as an offline instant-action mode, allowing players to face off against the Epic team's oft-touted AI bots.

"The purpose of the Beta Demo is to test the game on a large variety of hardware configurations and get gameplay feedback from the community," he added.

Shacknews is currently attending an Unreal Tournament 3 press event at Epic headquarters in Cary, North Carolina, so be sure to check back later in the week for impressions of the new game "from the makers of Gears of War."

There's an interview with Mark Rein on Eurogamer, chatting with the Epic Games VP at the Leipzig Games Convention. Topics include Gears of War, id Software's new technology, Unreal Engine 3 and the Silicon Knights complaint.

There's an interview with Mark Rein on FiringSquad, asking the Epic VP about Gears of War, post release content, and the release of Windows Vista.

The Computer & Video Games Mark Rein interview continues, with this part focusing on Unreal Engine 3, the PC market, Windows Vista and the Games for Windows push and the Wii.

During the Develop Conference in Brighton today, Epic Games VP Mark Rein delivered a keynote about the economic issues of next generation development, and the outspoken executives had some harsh words for the growing trend of episodic game content. "I’ve heard a lot of insane talk about episodic content," he said. "Very little of it makes any actual sense. It’s a broken business." Rein believes that the nature of episodic development will lead to too much repetition in games.

He explained, “Customers are supposed to buy half a game for $20, then wait six months for an episode? When I put a game down, I want to try a new one. Episodic games that offer faster turnaround will inevitably be using a lot of recycled content, walking through the same environments and shooting the same enemies with the same weapons.”

He said that episodic games could never compete will full-priced products. “They’re competing against massive marketing budgets. Distribution without marketing is worthless. You can’t buy retail marketing with a wholesale price of $15.” He added, “Full-price games have a cohesive start, middle and end.”

In fact, stated Rein, the games industry already operates on a proven episodic model as illustrated by the industry's frequent spinoffs and sequels. "What scares me is people betting their business on making money out of this [new episodic model]." Companies such as Valve and Telltale Games currently have business plans with a heavy emphasis on episodic content.

Some of Rein's statements were reportedly criticized by the keynote's audience. "Mark, you are a dinosaur, you are wrong," said one attendant, according to Next Generation. Another pointed out that Rein's company's flagship product, Unreal Engine 3, is heavily geared towards high-end, high-budget game development, and his comments regarding episodic content may be biased and self-serving. Rein noted that Epic offers an Xbox Live Arcade model for its engine. Indeed, Naked Sky's upcoming Live Arcade and PC title RoboBlitz uses Unreal Engine 3. However, based on a Naked Sky press release regarding the game, that situation may not be particularly common. "Next-generation game engines like Unreal Engine 3 use very large textures which make the 50MB requirement essentially impossible to meet with existing technologies," reads the statement; the developer avoided the problem by licensing technology to procedurally generate textures rather than have artists create them ahead of time. This is similar to techniques used in Will Wright's upcoming Spore.

Rein also reiterated a common opinion of his that Intel has been a prime factor in the decline of the PC gaming market by way of its widespread adoption of integrated graphics solutions rather than dedicated cards. "Intel is evil, we need to kick its ass," he said. "The difference in price in offering better graphics chips is negligible. You couldn’t buy a meal for that price. We’re talking five bucks.”

Computer & Video Games has a new interview with Epic's Mark Rein, asking him about a wide variety of topics including the Unreal Engine, UT2007 and Gears of War.

Computer & Video Games is the latest site with a Mark Rein interview, transcribing their chat with him during E3 about the Unreal Engine.

The latest Daily Dementia is now available, with Mark Rein of Epic making an appearance on the show. Rein talks about Unreal Engine 3, E3 plans and a couple of other topics.

There's a brief Q&A with Mark Rein on Unreality, which has the Epic VP answer questions about several things related to Unreal Tournament 2003. He's also asked about Unreal Warfare, but it'll be a while before we hear anything new on that.

Unreality has posted a brief chat log from a Mark Rein chat earlier this day. Epic's VP talks about various things related to Unreal Tournament 2003. Update: looks like the chat log was pulled.

As promised, HomeLAN Fed has posted the Mark Rein interview. Epic's VP discusses the Unreal franchise, answers questions about Unreal Tournament 2, Unreal 2 (pretty big news about the multiplayer part), the continued development of the Unreal engine, the Unreal Performance Test, and what's up with Epic's own game, among other things. Pretty informative read.

When Unreal Tournament 2 is released I think you're going to see mod makers taking to this engine like never before and I think you'll also see the engine being used for a lot more things outside of gaming. UT2 has 100 to 200 times the detail (on-screen poly counts) of the original game but, if you have the hardware to run it, there's nothing stopping you from creating content that's 1000 times the detail of UT, 2000 times or even more than that. That kind of hardware should be on store shelves and in consumers' hands before the end of 2002! So now all those interesting non-gaming uses that requires huge polygons counts have a game and a set of tools on which they can go to town. When the game gets released we'll not only release most of our tools along with it but we'll also release some of the documentation on the Unreal Developer Network. This not only has implications for Unreal Tournament 2 but also for Unreal 2 which is coming a few months later.

Epic VP Mark Rein has been interviewed on Stomped. They talk about the PS2 version of Unreal Tournament and the missing online play support for that port, a possible UT mission pack, and console vs. PC gaming.

R-POV has a pretty interesting interview with Mark Rein of Epic Games asking of course about his work involved with the company and a lot of the business side questions.

OzUT has a mp3 interview up with Epic's Mark Rein. It's a 7.8mb download, but that gives you a 24 minute interview. Thanks UTWorld.

The pre-E3 coverage continues on the Stomped @ E3 site. Only 91 days to go ;) Today they asked Epic's Mark Rein about his most memorable E3 and the thing he is looking forward to most. Also on the site is word that The Collective's Unreal engine Star Trek: Deep Space 9 game will be playable on the floor at E3.

The folks at MacGamer have a new interview with Mark Rein of Epic.