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First company to licence its games engine

First company to licence its games engine
Who
id Software
Where
United States
When
03 December 1993
After the success of Wolfenstein 3D (id Software, 1992), developer id Software began to licence its game engine – the development tools id Software had used to make the game – for commercial use by other developers. Prior to this developers had created their own game engines, which they guarded jealously.

A game engine in the set of tools used to build a game.

From its inception US-based developers id Software eschewed the standard model of publishing, instead adopting the shareware episodic model of distributing its games, where the first episode or collection of levels is free and subsequent parts must be purchased.