[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).