A History of the Unity Game Engine
John K. Haas · Digital WPI · 2014
Unity is a game engine and integrated development environment (IDE) for creating interactive media, typically video games. As CEO David Helgason put it, Unity “is a toolset used to build games, and it’s the technology that executes the graphics, the audio, the physics, the interactions, [and] the networking.” Unity is famous for its fast prototyping capabilities and large number of publishing targets. The initial product launched on June 6, 2005. The goal was to create an affordable game engine with professional tools for amateur game developers while “democratize[ing the] game development” industry. When originally released, Unity was available solely for Mac OS X, and developers could only deploy their creations to a few platforms. Now, Unity is offered on over a dozen platforms.