Meet The Immense Engine (Yes, the name is dramatic)
Arjan Brussee — a veteran coder who helped shape Jazz Jackrabbit and co-founded Guerrilla Games before spending years at Epic around Unreal — is quietly working on a new graphics engine. He’s pitching it as a European-first alternative to the usual suspects: Unreal and Unity.
The pitch isn’t just marketing fluff. Brussee wants tooling that’s built, hosted, and regulated inside Europe, aimed at industries that care about where their software runs and who controls it. That means games, sure, but also defense, logistics, and industrial simulators where data sovereignty actually matters.
Why this could matter to devs and players
From a gameplay and development angle, a fresh engine could mean more competition — better tooling, more innovation, and possibly features tailored to modern workflows. Brussee specifically calls out AI as a game-changer: current engines were designed around mouse-and-menu workflows, and he thinks a rethink is needed to integrate AI-first tools and agent-driven pipelines.
He’s also suggesting that well-designed AI agents could massively speed up production — he’s thrown out the idea that they could do the work of “ten or fifteen people” in certain tasks. If that pans out, smaller teams might punch way above their weight, and studios could move faster on everything from level creation to NPC behavior.
That said, Unreal and Unity still dominate the landscape. The Immense Engine has no public release date or technical demo yet, so concrete impact on actual games is speculative for now.
Where this stands and why to keep an eye on it
Brussee’s resume gives the idea some weight: decades in games, time at Epic, and hands-on experience with engine-product management. That pedigree makes this more than a hobby project, but the usual caveats apply — big assumptions about adoption, tooling maturity, and ecosystem support need to be proven.
For developers and organizations sensitive to jurisdiction and compliance, a Europe-hosted engine could be genuinely appealing. For gamers, the upside is indirect but real: more competition can push tech forward, reduce licensing headaches, and encourage new workflows that may translate into better games.
Bottom line: The Immense Engine is an intriguing play on sovereignty and AI-driven workflows, backed by an industry vet. It’s worth watching, but treat early details as unconfirmed until we see code, demos, or a release roadmap.
