Best Game Engine

[TinCow]

I made a disparaging comment about Bioware's Aurora engine in the Gaming News thread. That got me thinking about game engines in general and I thought it would be interesting to discuss them. So, the question is: what are the best game engines of all time?

Feel free to define 'best' however you want. My personal nominees are:

Infinity Engine - Bioware's engine for the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and PST games. This is one of my favorite engines of all time due to its great appearance and ease of use. D&D games have always posed problems for game engines due to the extremely large rule sets involved. While the manuals for these games were invariably massive, the interfaces themselves were relatively simple. They allowed for easy access to all necessary information and commands without cluttering up the screen or requiring more than a couple clicks. They also provided for excellent RPG interaction, as well as extremely good tactical fights. Top it off with some of the best 2D graphics ever made, which still look decent on modern computers if run with a high resolution mod.

Quake I Engine - A technically revolutionary engine, which was responsible for a massive increase in the visual quality of FPS games. The basic concepts were so good that it has been continually improved and refined through further versions and is directly responsible for a sizable chunk of all FPS games ever released. Significantly, this includes all iD and Valve games, whose later games were all directly based on improved versions and evolutions of the Quake I engine. Yes, even the Doom 3 and Source engines built off of the foundations of the Quake I engine. The Unreal engine is about the only thing that can even compare to the Quake I Engine in terms of impact, IMO.

Gamebryo Engine - This wins the versatility award. I'm not quite sure how this engine manages to do what it does, but according to wikipedia, it is responsible for first person games like Oblivion and Fallout 3, top-down strategy games like Civ IV and Empire Earth II, and even MMORPGs like DAOC and Warhammer Online. Whoever programmed this thing must be a genius, because that's some absurd flexibility.

[Praxil]

Unreal engines 1, 2 and 3: Most successful engine family ever?

id Tech 3: The ability to customize the visuals and other aspects of the games using this engine. Is exactly why people love games using this engine. This is highly important for competitive gamers, they play with pretty much no visuals on at all. Unless it improves the ability to kill, something that helps with the ability to recognize the opponent faster and so on. It is all about the need to get consistent over 70 frames per second, no matter what happens on the screen. This is why the ability to strip all eye candy is so important.

Call of Duty 4 engine: Doesn't have name as far as I know. The ability to handle huge amount of effects and still keep up at consistent 60 frames per second, is simply stunning IMO.

[caravel]

Agree 100% as regards the Quake, Infinity and Unreal engines.

Also worth a mention:

The Total War engine (MTW/STW).

The Dark Engine (Thief/Thief II/System Shock II).

[Kekvit Irae]

Pop on another vote for the Dark Engine.

[Husar]

I don't know whether it had a specific name but the Operation Flashpoint engine, it was sort of revolutionary because it could handle huge islands(streaming) and long viewing distances.
Concerning streaming, the Gothic engines do that reasonably well as well, using one or two cores to do the streaming of the world in the background is something I hope we will see more often in the future.

[Whacker]

I get the feeling this is going to be a bunch of gloryposting. I love just about everything mentioned so far.

My adds:

Lucasart's SCUMM engine. Nothing more need be said.

The original X-Wing and TIE-Fighter game engines. Those were very well executed for their time.

Janes/EA's US Navy Fighters/Advanced Tactical Fighters/USNF 97/Fighters Anthology engine. Sure it got old and creaky, but it scaled well on the hardware at the time, and those games were par none the best military "flight sims" for their time.

As much as I love everything so far, I'd say my top single vote has to go to id Software and the Q1 engine. Nothing else has come as close to being such a major jumping point for a huge part of the gaming industry. Valve's engines were based on it. I've read that the Unreal guys got most of their ideas and some code from it. Even long after it's lifespan, games were still based on it, or the Quake 2 source, etc etc etc. It spawned so many things it's not even funny, therefore it gets my single vote

[Big_John]

whatever the myth engine was.. that was pretty cool.

[Husar]

Janes/EA's US Navy Fighters/Advanced Tactical Fighters/USNF 97/Fighters Anthology engine. Sure it got old and creaky, but it scaled well on the hardware at the time, and those games were par none the best military "flight sims" for their time.

I was too young to know anything about engines back then but I absolutely loved USNF 97 and ATF, too bad I never knew FA existed until a few years ago when it was far too late.

[Fragony]

Dark engine. Still is, always been.

[Productivity]

The id tech series of engines. By far the most important in terms of FPS engine development that there have ever been. Every major engine has been highly derivative of these sets and the software development world has a hell of a lot to thank id and Carmack for.

[professorspatula]

RenderWare - powered a huge number of games over the years. Provided decent middle-ware to numerous developers. A shame EA got their grubby hands on it. It powered Grand Theft Auto III and it's many other PS2 era sequels.

Actually I have no great affinity with the engine, but it's one of those overlooked things when people talk about game engines.

Adventure Game writers on the old ZX Spectrum would no doubt say PAWS is the greatest engine of all time!