Epic Games announces four finalists for Make Something Unreal Live 2013

Four teams will advance to the final round of Epic Games' Make Something Unreal Live 2013, and will present their finished products at the London Gadget Show Live exhibition in April next year, Epic announced today.

The competition asks European students of game development to create games based on a specific theme, this year's being "‘Mendelian Inheritance: genetics and genomics," and using Epic's Unreal Engine development kit. The winning team will receive a commercial license for Unreal Engine 4 for PC digital distribution.

Finalists include Dead Shark Triplepunch's Loch Ness, Kairos Games' Polymorph, Static Games' Mendel's Farm and Team Summit's Beings.

Teams were judged on the scientific implementation of the Mendelian theme, concept originality and quality of presentations. The panels of judges included UKIE CEO Jo Twist, Fireteam CEO Stephen Gaffney, PCGamesN editor Tim Edwards and senior staff from Epic Games and medical grant company the Wellcome Trust.

"We were hugely impressed by the quality of all 12 shortlisted entries to this year's competition," said Epic Games European territory manager Mike Gamble. "We have some real talent among the teams and it was a difficult decision to pick just four from the original 12 games."

"Interestingly, all four finalists tackled different characteristics of the theme, cleverly representing important, and often misunderstood, aspects of Mendelian Inheritance," said Wellcome Trust member Dr. Darren Logan. "The constraints of the theme have challenged the teams to think more creatively and they have demonstrated the potential to really enhance the game through the science itself."

Viewers can keep track of Make Something Unreal Live progress at the competition's Facebook page.