A game engine is the core of a game, a software componant that handles all the necessary technology such as rendering and artificial intelligence (AI).
A game engine is alot different from the game itself, its alot like a car and a car engine, you can take the engine out of the car and build another shell around it and this is what games are like. Today multiple games will use the same game engine.
Unreal Tournament 3 Gears Of War
Unreal 3 engine
The first game to be made was Spacewar, this 2d game took many years and much development to finally be shipped with each PDP computer at the time. Spacewar never kicked off untill two university students played the game and remade a new game based on it. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney made a clone game called Computer Space, this became a failure because of complex controls,and pages of instructions. A few years later Nolan and Ted developed Atari Inc.
Some of the first 2d games include Donkey Kong (1981), Space Invaders (1978), Pacman (1980), Pong (1972)
