Unreal Tournament 3 Interview

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Eurogamer: Are you done with UT3 now, or will there be more downloadable stuff coming?

Mark Rein: We're never done. You look at what we've done in the past with UT...one could jump to the conclusion that there's more coming and obviously now we've started the million-dollar Intel Make Something Unreal contest, there's going to be a ton of great content coming to this game, and we want to capitalise on that content and share it around all the platforms if we can.

Eurogamer: Talking of Unreal, it's, what, more than five years since Unreal 2. Are you ever going to make a follow-up to that? Is there any possibility?

Mark Rein: I'm sure that at some point in our future we will make another Unreal, single-player, story-driven game. I'm sure at some point there will be one. There are no plans to do one today.

Eurogamer: Why haven't you chosen to do a follow-up to Unreal 2 to date?

Mark Rein: I think we've been really happy with the multiplayer-oriented Unreal Tournament. Despite what people feel, people get this crazy idea that if you don't sell five million units it isn't a success, but we heard today that we've shipped over 1.2 million units of UT3, not even including the Xbox 360 yet. We make good money on Unreal Tournament, and it's a good game that we love to make, and it's not a five-year-long production and it's a great test-bed for lots of cool things that we want to do. We like making this type of game, and we have Gears of War as our kind of vanguard, single-player graphic showcase type of game.

Eurogamer: You've got your hands full there.

Mark Rein: And we're coming up with ideas for new intellectual properties.

Eurogamer: Announcing this year?

Mark Rein: No, no...ways off! We learned a lot from creating Unreal and Gears of War, there are lessons to be learned.

Eurogamer: Will you stick to your guns, as it were, and keep making shooters? It's proven that the Unreal Engine 3 can handle pretty much any genre you throw at it.

Mark Rein: Haha, stuck to our guns, that's great. Well, there's lots of low-hanging fruit in shooters. We can still do better, we can constantly improve.

"Bio Rifle" is what I like to call my [manners - Ed].

Eurogamer: You must play lots of other types of games.

Mark Rein: Is Spielberg bored of making action movies?

Eurogamer: No, but even he does his little arty projects now and again. [What, like Schindler's List? - Ed] Don't you feel like doing something completely unrelated to what you've done before?

Mark Rein: We will, I just don't know when. We just feel like we can do a better job at these. People are seeing with Unreal Tournament 3, and will especially see with Gears of War 2 that we're getting better and better every time. We think we can do better!

Eurogamer: Have you officially retired the Unreal Championship games now that the current crop of consoles can do Unreal Tournament properly?

Mark Rein: Yeah...that's a good question for Mike [Capps - Ed], I mean he designed those games. I think the guys would love to make another Unreal Championship, but there's only so many things you can do in a year.