// the take
A single README cataloging which game studios — from AAA giants down to solo developers — built their own engine instead of licensing Unreal or Unity, with links to source material for each entry. It's reference reading for developers curious about engine history and what it actually takes to ship a game on custom tech, not a library or tool you install.
It's organized by studio size (AAA, AA, indie, solo), which makes 'how small a team can still pull off a custom engine' answerable at a glance instead of requiring your own research. Most entries link to GDC talks, developer interviews, or Wikipedia rather than stating facts with no source. The one-person-engine section is a genuinely useful list of pointers if you're researching what a solo dev engine needs to actually ship something real, like Teardown or Animal Well.
It's a flat set of markdown tables in one file with no search or filtering — finding a specific engine means ctrl-F across hundreds of rows. Employee counts and some engine attributions are explicitly from a 2020 snapshot and the README itself says to take them with a grain of salt; nothing suggests they've been refreshed since. Coverage is inherently uneven and skewed toward what's publicly documented, and there's a literal unsorted TODO list of entries sitting at the bottom that's been there a while. Its value depends entirely on contributors noticing and fixing staleness, and there's no indication anyone's doing that systematically.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →