The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games that is written in C++, making it highly portable. It has been used to create many popular first person shooter and other genre games since its first version in 1998. There have been four major versions of Unreal Engine released, each featuring technical improvements and expanded platform support. The current version, Unreal Engine 4, targets next generation consoles and devices and includes physically based rendering and improved development tools.