Unreal Engine is a powerful game engine developed by Epic Games, an American multinational video game company headquartered in Cary, North Carolina.

The engine was first released in 1998 and has since become one of the most popular game engines used in the industry.

Epic Games was founded in 1991 by Tim Sweeney and J. Mark Sweeney. The company was originally called Personal Gaming Systems and was focused on developing games for the DOS operating system. However, in 1993, the company changed its name to Epic Games and began working on Unreal Engine.

Unreal Engine is a cross-platform game engine that supports various programming languages, including C++, C, and Blueprints. It has been used to develop some of the most popular games in recent years, including Fortnite, Paragon, and The Division.

Epic Games has also released several versions of Unreal Engine, including version 4, which was first introduced in 2016. This version introduced many new features and improvements over previous versions, making it an even more powerful tool for game developers.

Overall, Epic Games is the tech giant behind Unreal Engine, and its continued development and improvement have made it one of the most popular and widely used game engines in the industry.