[TonyTrapp]

Engines that come to mind: XnGine (Daggerfall, Terminator, ...), Dark Engine (Thief, System Shock 2), Build (Duke 3D, Blood...). Yes, they existed before the 2000s, but the difference to today is that there were many engines being reused for a handful of games at most. Today it's few engines running most games.

[holoduke]

Battlefield, gta, alan wake, ms flightsim, cyberpunk, hogsward (unreal) all top games with different engines. Agree that unreal engine has many games, but plenty of alternatives

[TonyTrapp]

That's a pretty small selection of well-known AAA games. Those few examples really don't change the general skew towards using 3rd party engines these days vs. few games doing something like that in the 90s. And in fact, most of these engines have also been reused between games (with heavy modifications of course - e.g. Remedy's Northlight engine has been evolving since Alan Wake 1).

[holoduke]

Build engine duke nukem also used in many other games like blood etc. Same for quake engine. Even doom engine was used in games like hexen. Doom was also an evolution of the wolfenstein engine. Quake 1 to later quake engines all evolutions and used in a lot of other games. These are all 3d engines. On the nes, snes and sega machines the same platform engine was reused in 1000s of games. Same for sound engines, physics engines etc. My point is. I dont think there is a lot of difference. Innovation still happening today. Not everything is Unreal.

[wk_end]

> On the nes, snes and sega machines the same platform engine was reused in 1000s of games.

No, this isn't true. Almost all games were bespoke back in that era - the machines simply weren't powerful enough to allow for competitive, flexible game engines. An individual development house might have a code library or base that they'd iterate on, but there was little sharing between different companies (much less reuse by the thousands).

By the 16-bit era sound engines did tend to be widely reused, though (e.g. GEMS).

[Arrath]

Honestly it seems like it always has: there are a handful of dev houses using their own engine for a spread of games (e.g. EA with Frostbite, Ubi with Anvil, Rockstar with RAGE, Bungie with whatever they call the Halo/Destiny engine these days), then UE or Unity are out there mass licensed for a whole bunch of stuff, then the few less widely licensed engines like Source.

[lmm]

That's not how it always has been. Licensing engines was virtually unknown 30 years ago (and when it happened at all it was within a very narrow range for making games in the same genre, more like asset swaps and level packs than outright new games), and new and exciting in the '00s.

[Arrath]

Yeah sorry I meant from, like, 2000-ish and on.

[CalRobert]

I wanted to mention the odd adventure game Normality as using the Doom engine, but I can't find a source

[wk_end]

I'm pretty sure Normality ran on the in-house Gremlin Interactive engine that powered the excellent Realms of the Haunting.

[sonicanatidae]

+1 for the Daggerfall mention. I haven't thought about that game in 1000 years and loved it.