14 DAY TRIAL // An interview with Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, creators of the Unreal Engine and the Unreal game franchise, reveals that one of the company's engine licensees is thinking of porting the Unreal Engine 3 onto Nintendo's Wii, according to next-gen.biz. Apparently, Epic themselves have no direct connection to this story though, while Rein even states that using UE3 for Wii doesn't make much sense.
"I know one of our licensees who's giving it a shot. It's their own port, in the same way Ubisoft brought Unreal Engine 2 to the Wii," Rein told Kikizo (via CVG) at the Unreal Tournament III launch event in Birmingham, according to the upper mentioned source.
Hinting at the Wii's limited power, Rein continues his speech: "There's so many things we can do and are already doing, to improve our engine, on the platforms we're aiming it at, that going back and working on that [Wii] just doesn't make sense," he said.
So as you can see, Epic doesn't even have the slightest intention to port its fancy proprietary engine for developing games on Wii.
Now, while this piece of news is by far no breaking material, it is quite interesting indeed that someone's attempting to use Epic's famous Unreal Engine 3 for Wii. What software it's going to make use of it however, is unknown at this time, as is the name of that respective licensee. But why would someone want to do that?
It's all too well known that the Wii sports much less "horse power" than its competitors, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, so given that everyone's fine with the graphics, sound, gameplay and especially the control system it features, whatever the title that licensee is intending to throw at the Wii, it must be a damned serious one to use Epic's Unreal Engine 3. Stay close for updates. Who knows, maybe BioShock is coming to the Wii... Naaa!