Epic Won’t Deny That GDC Demo Might See Release News

Mark Rein has said that Epic isn’t currently working on turning their impressive GDC ‘Samaritan’ tech demo into a full game, but wouldn’t deny that it might eventually happen.

In an interview with 1UP, Rein was non-commital about the possibility after it was noted that an early Unreal Engine 3 tech demo eventually became Gears of War.

“I'm not going to deny that that's possible, but at the same time, if we hadn't had built that technology demo, then we wouldn't have been able to build Gears of War. It's like, once we build a technology demo and learn how to do things a certain way, it then enables us to do more of that. So I don't want to deny that such a scenario is possible, but it's not currently [happening],” Rein explained.

“Remember we built a demo many years before that which was a "high end Unreal Engine 2 demo" where we had a character rip the arm off another character and beat him with it? That content ended up appearing as some sort of extra free content for Unreal Tournament, but it wasn't an actual game we were building at the time.”

Although the tech demo (below) represents a clear leap from the capability of current consoles, Rein justified calling it an Unreal Engine 3 demo.

“What we've done in the past is that we draw the line with the console generations. I don't want to pigeon-hole Unreal Engine as a console-only technology -- it's also mobile, handheld, and PC technology. But so far, that's how it works. When these new ultra-mass market home entertainment devices come out and set a new bar, that's when you'll see us clicking over to "Unreal Engine 4" -- which will support those features and who knows what else.”