Before Unreal Engine, before Fortnite and before a net worth counted in billions, Tim Sweeney built a jungle platformer about a heroine named Jill. Released for MS-DOS in June 1992 by his tiny company Epic MegaGames, Jill of the Jungle is, in Sweeney’s own words, the “last game [he] designed”.
Every Epic hit since then, from Unreal to Gears of War to Fortnite, came from teams he led or engines he wrote rather than from his own design notebook. Jill was the final time the founder sat in the designer’s chair.
A Nintendo-style game with a twist
Sweeney wanted something that looked and played like a console platformer, and he picked a female lead as the hook that would set it apart from the crowd of male mascots in 1992. The project began life as a level editor for platform games. When it came time for art and music, he admitted he lacked the skills and hired four people; the game’s credits list artists Joe Hitchens and John Pallett-Plowright and composer Dan Froelich.
The result let players run, jump and throw weapons picked up along the way, such as a dagger or a spinning blade. Certain stages turn Jill into a phoenix that flies, a frog that leaps or a fish that swims, and switches and keys gate the way forward.
Three episodes, one shareware plan
Epic copied the distribution trick made famous by Apogee Software: give the first episode away and sell the rest. The trilogy shipped as three parts:
- Jill of the Jungle: 14 levels, counting an ending level, plus two bonus stages tied together by a map screen.
- Jill Goes Underground: no map at all, just 19 levels in a row and an ending.
- Jill Saves the Prince: a new overhead-view map that broke with the first two parts.
A year later the three were bundled as Jill of the Jungle: The Complete Trilogy. Soon after launch the game was selling 20 to 30 copies a day. Kept up for a full year, that pace works out to roughly 7,300 to 11,000 copies, a solid result for a student-run shareware label.
From Potomac Computer Systems to Epic
The timeline shows how quickly Sweeney moved from designer to company builder:
Around 1991: his text-editor-turned-game ZZT earns roughly $100 a day, and he renames his consulting outfit, Potomac Computer Systems, to Epic MegaGames.
June 1992: Jill of the Jungle ships after Sweeney realizes he cannot finish it alone and assembles a four-person team.
Soon after: he brings in Mark Rein as a business partner; the company grows so fast that Sweeney leaves the University of Maryland one credit short of his degree.
1998: Unreal debuts on Sweeney’s Unreal Engine.
1999: the company moves to North Carolina and becomes Epic Games.
Unreal Engine 3 later powered the 2006 shooter Gears of War, a series that just marked Gears of War’s 20th anniversary with a free General Raam for E-Day players. For another look at how early-1990s PC games evolved, see our guide to The Secret of Monkey Island’s many versions.
What happened to Jill
A sequel, Jill of the Jungle II, was being made by another studio, but it was reworked into Vinyl Goddess from Mars, published by Union Logic in 1995. Jill herself went quiet until November 2018, when The Complete Trilogy was released for free on GOG.com. Anyone curious can still try the game that closed Sweeney’s design career, 34 years after its June 1992 debut.
Further reading
Image: Official GDC, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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