Last night I watched some videos of the Epic’s newly released “Gears of War 2.” It’s of special interest to me because I was VP of programming at a game company developing a game on Epic’s engine during the Unreal Tournament/Warfare time frame around 2000-2002. Working with this game engine was one of the most challenging and fun things I’ve ever done.

It’s amazing what these game engines do and the amount of artistic, technical, and organizational work that goes into creating these games. They integrate bleeding edge of 3D art, interactive storytelling, computer rendering, artificial intelligence, computer performance and other disciplines into one creation.

Games like this are approaching the quality of movies with live actors. However, the scenes are being generated in 3D, in real-time, in interactive response to the user. It's amazing

Something to think about for both writers and programmers: how do you program a story