Once America's Army launched and gamers devoured it - the game was downloaded over 30 million times in the first year of its launch - Epic approached Capps about forming a new subsidiary company called Scion.
"They wanted to do the Gears of War thing, and they knew they couldn't do two things at once, since they were sorta disorganized," he says, "so they wanted to shop Unreal out, but their experience had been not so great. With UT 2003 [sales] went OK but not great, and Unreal 2 was dragging along, and so they said, 'Maybe we could have a studio make Unreal right down the hall from us.'
"So I showed up right in the middle of crunch for Unreal Tournament 2003 and helped ship that. Then I built up a team and made Unreal Championship 2, and as we were making it, Epic was moving to this new building, and they said, 'Gosh, it kinda sucks we're going to be moving away from you guys,' because there was a lot of synergy back and forth between our two companies. So we decided to merge the two shops. My management team kinda took over the combined company. We were the organized, military-hierarchy approach to game development, and they were the jazz band."
As a result of the merger, Capps was named president of Epic, and currently runs the company's corporate day-to-day. "Some days, I'm just a switchboard operator," he says. "Mails come in, and I point them to the right people. So I get a mail from Midway saying, 'Oh, God, we've got this marketing thing we need to figure out right away!' and I'll say, 'Ah! You're wanting to talk to Jeff and so and so,' then it comes back and I kind of put the stamp on it.
"I don't contribute much to the development anymore. I still write. I wrote Unreal Tournament. I wrote all the scripts for that. And I do a lot of our licensing work. I'm working with the comics, and the novels, and the action figure folks, and stuff like that. But really my job is to make sure everything's moving smoothly. ... I'm sort of the final arbiter of 'Yes, we're going to do it,' or 'No.'"
Capps feels he plays the role of bad cop. It's not a role he likes, but he feels it's necessary to the company's success. "Tim Sweeney ... is the sweetest guy on the planet. He does not want to be the one who tells someone, 'Hey, that's three days in a row that you've shown up at 3:00 in the afternoon drunk.'"
"I've never been a great manager," Sweeney confirms.
"That's something that was needed here," Capps continues. "There was not a lot of structure at Epic, and I'm pretty proud of adding structure."
That structure has certainly helped the company's bottom line. Though they adapted to their role as a AAA developer rather well, Capps' leadership has allowed their engine business take off. Since he joined the team in 2002, the company has licensed the Unreal Engine 3 platform for "hundreds" of games and is the de facto middleware solution on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3.
Capps' bottom line for his time at Epic: "I didn't screw it up, and I made them able to do more."
