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Guerrilla founder and former Epic executive launches fully European game engine

Dutch game veteran Arjan Brussee is working on a start-up that aims to create a new type of ‘engine’ for video games, based on new construction principles and the full integration of AI. An engine intended to serve as a worthy European alternative to American and Chinese competitors, he explains in the BNR podcast De Technoloog.

If there is one Dutchman who has had an influence on the international game industry, it is Arjan Brussee. He worked with industry legend Cliff Bleszinski on the hit Jazz Jackrabbit, was one of the founders of the Amsterdam studio Guerrilla Games, and has worked as technical director at Epic Games—world-famous as the publisher of the game Fortnite—in recent years. Brussee was a guest on the podcast De Technoloog, where he unveiled his new plans: fresh back from the US, he is working in the Netherlands on a start-up that will build a new type of game engine, the Immense Engine, intended to serve as the engine for 3D worlds in games and other digital simulations and worlds.

Brussee: ‘The rise of AI means that we need to approach the development of this kind of crucial software differently. As an old hand with a vision of how things should work, I see opportunities there.’ According to Brussee, AI should be viewed as ‘an infinite army of junior programmers’ to whom you can assign a task that would take an enormous amount of time if you were doing it yourself as a programmer.

‘If you are smart and you know how to put a good framework of AI agents to work, then you can do the work of ten or fifteen people,’ states Brussee.

An engine that is ‘native AI,’ in other words. That does, however, require a different way of looking at how a game engine is built. Brussee’s previous project, the globally used Unreal Engine that powers games like Fortnite, can be seen as an immense structure consisting of millions of lines of code. ‘That structure was built for and by people who need to click through a menu with a mouse. If you want to change something, it has to be done for the entire engine.’

Modules The Immense Engine has a very different setup: it controls AI agents like Claude or ChatGPT, which hang in the system as modules. ‘If Anthropic comes up with something new that is interesting, you can integrate it more easily, allowing you to keep up with the incredibly rapid developments surrounding AI and ensuring you don’t quickly become dependent on outdated software.’

Now that Brussee is back in the Netherlands, there is also the opportunity to offer something the market is not yet familiar with: a fully European engine capable of competing with American and Chinese products in a market. ‘No one is currently making an engine that is fully European-hosted, built by Europeans, and complies with European rules and guidelines.’ This engine does do that, so that it can soon also be used for 3D simulations by parties such as Defense or in logistics. ‘Creating usable 3D worlds is becoming increasingly important, certainly for purposes other than just gaming.’

[translated from Dutch with AI]