Make Something Unreal

The first competition, titled $1,000,000 Make Something Unreal Contest, was held in 2004 in partnership with Nvidia, Digital Extremes, and Atari[2] It was described as "a way to reward a growing community of gamers that are helping to spark the evolution of 3D entertainment".

[7] Friedrich Kirschner won US$25,000 in the Best Non-Interactive Real Time Movie category for a short film titled The Journey.

[19] The chosen teams were required to spend the six months prior to Gadget Show Live developing games, based on roleplay gamebooks Fighting Fantasy,[20] until a final two-day event at the live show, where they received guidance from developers such as Cliff Bleszinski, Jon Hare, and Peter Molyneux.

[22] Development team Commander Kiwi won the 2012 contest with their fantasy RPG game Warlock of Firetop Mountain: Lost Chapters, winning them a full commercial license for Unreal Engine 3.

The competition was open to students who were tasked with making pitches for a PC game using the Unreal Development Kit based on the theme 'mendelian genetics'.

[27] A panel of judges, including senior personnel from Epic Games, chose four teams to progress to the final, stating that they were "hugely impressed by the quality of all 12 shortlisted entries to this year’s competition.

"[28] At Gadget Show Live 2013 a similar format to 2012 was followed, with judges including Peter Molyneux and BioWare producer Mike Gamble.

"[30] MSUL 2013 was also supported by Staffordshire University, Epic's educational partner for the program, and UKIE, the games industry trade association.