Sound boring? Not at all. In fact, it may be the best thing that's every happened to game geeks.
By far the most intense technological competition in the games industry takes place in the genre dubbed the "first-person shooter" -- games like Quake, Unreal, and Duke Nukem in which players run around in 3-dimensional virtual mazes, shooting monsters and occasionally each other. But the competitive atmosphere of the industry is changing, as more and more companies choose to license an existing "game engine" -- the core of the game that generates its 3D virtual world - from another company rather than develop their own. MORE >>