Epic Games teamed up with sponsor Intel Corporation for the 2008/2009 “$1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal Contest,” and created one of the biggest contests in gaming history. The contest featured some of the world’s best design studios among the thousands of participants.

The 18 month contest challenged aspiring game developers to create modifications for the PC version of Unreal Tournament 3 in a wide range of categories including environments, characters, weapons, gameplay, tools, vehicles and more.

“To all you aspiring game developers out there – this is your chance to get in the big leagues,” said Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games.

“We have categories for all kinds of creatively talented people including programmers, artists, 3D modelers, designers and even aspiring film directors. You get to use the same world-class Unreal Engine 3 toolset we used to create Unreal Tournament 3 and Gears of War.”

Tripwire Interactive was the winner of the previous “Make Something Unreal Contest,” with its World War II shooter Red Orchestra.

“Winning the ‘Make Something Unreal Contest’ helped the Tripwire Interactive team realize our dream of founding our own development studio and bringing our game to retail,” said president John Gibson. “It is a real life ‘Rags to Retail’ story.”

The 2008 contest grand prize includes an Unreal Engine 3 license and other cash and prizes including Intel development products and Velocity Micro PCs based upon the Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform with two Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core processors.

Content created for the contest will be freely available to players of the PC version of Unreal Tournament 3 worldwide.

Judging for the contest will begin in June and content will be judged in four preliminary phases with the grand final prizes being awarded in fall 2009.

UnrealPHD competed in phases 2, 3, and 4 with a total of 8 official entries in the best Death Match level, best artwork, and best custom vehicles categories. Final judging is still ongoing. In the vehicles category the finalists were named, and we were one of three Honorable Mentions for our game entry. We are very pleased at the acknowledgement, and that is enough inspiration, along with the UDK, that we are now committed to making standalone games for the PC, and video training tutorials of how to create your own games in the UDK editor. Our game entry had custom 3d models from both Maya and 3d StudioMax, and we used Zbrush, and next-gen game techniques such as displacement and normal maps, and we will be posting some free tutorials that cover different aspects of the game design industry. Sign up to our newsletter or forum to stay informed of new videos and 3d content.