Many people tell the story of Tim Sweeney as the kid who taught himself to code, made a game at home with his parents, and then turned it into a billion-dollar business. That story is true. It’s also not finished.
I was born in 1970 and grew up in Potomac, Maryland. My youngest brother is also named Sweeney. By the time he was five or six, he had already taken a lawnmower apart to see how it worked. After a few years, he built his own go-kart. In the late 1970s, when arcade games first came out, he didn’t just want to play them; he also wanted to figure out who had written the code inside the cabinet. He never really got rid of that instinct, that kind of restlessness.
When he was eleven, he went to see his older brother’s business in California and used an IBM PC for the first time. He learned BASIC there for a whole week. Later, when he got home with an Apple II, he started making games that only he and online message boards saw. He did this for between 10,000 and 15,000 hours of self-directed learning between the ages of 11 and 15. This is the kind of origin story that sounds almost too good to be true now. The time was correct, though. I really did have an obsession.
In about 1989, he went to the University of Maryland to study mechanical engineering, even though computers had already caught his attention. He started Potomac Computer Systems, a small consulting business, from his parents’ house. It didn’t go anywhere. He changed his mind and now spends nights and weekends making a game. But first, he has to make a text editor so he can write the game. That text editor turned into a game in the end. It was ZZT. The book sold a few copies every day for about $100 each, and Sweeney thought that was a sign. The company is now called Epic MegaGames. With just one credit left, he didn’t look back.
Epic moved to North Carolina in 1999 after Unreal, the game and the engine that powered it, made the company famous in ways that surprised even people who were very familiar with the business. It wasn’t just game studios that licensed the engine in the end; film studios, architects, automakers, and simulation companies also used it. Unreal Engine is likely the company’s most important product right now. The news is all about Fortnite. The engine changes the way whole industries make visual content.
It’s hard to believe that Epic Games has grown to the point where it has over 800 million accounts and more than six billion friend connections across all of its platforms. The Epic Games Store has become a real competitor in the way digital games are sold. Since years ago, Sweeney, who is still CEO, has been publicly criticizing the actions of platform gatekeepers, most notably Apple. This made him an unusual voice in a debate that affected many more people than just gamers.
What Sweeney has been doing with his own money since about 2008 doesn’t get as much attention. He bought some forests. Not as investment properties, but as land for wildlife. He has bought more than 50,000 acres of land in North Carolina, making him one of the biggest private landowners in the state. He spent $15 million on just the 7,000-acre Box Creek Wilderness, which is home to more than 130 rare and threatened species. He then gave the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service a conservation easement. In 2021, he told the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy that he was giving away 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands. This was the largest private gift of conservation land in North Carolina history.
Some people who watch from the outside might feel like the conservation work and the gaming empire aren’t connected to each other. But for Sweeney, they seem to come from the same deep-seated desire: he’s still the same kid who wanted to know how things worked and now wants to protect things that are important. The North Carolina Wildlife Federation gave him an award for his work to protect wildlife, and at the 2017 Game Developers Choice Awards, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award. Forbes named him Person of the Year in 2020.
Different people have different estimates of his net worth. Forbes says it’s around $7.6 billion, while Bloomberg says it’s closer to $9.6 billion. He’s built a company that began in his bedroom, an engine that powers a lot of the visual world around us, and a land conservation effort that will probably last longer than all of those things put together.
