A game changer – Unreal Engine 3 now runs in Flash

Forget everything you’re reading about Apple’s new iPhone technology – the most impressive development for games in the last 24 hours is this: Unreal Engine 3 now runs in Flash.

Unveiled by Epic Games Chief Executive Officer, Founder and Technical Director Tim Sweeney during a keynote at Adobe’s MAX 2011event, a live demo showed how a high end game like Unreal Tournament 3 – originally a PS3, 360 and PC titles – can be run in realtime on Flash 11.

Flash Player 11, released on Monday, features a hardware accelerated, programmable graphics pipeline, meaning it can host triple-A-style content made in UE3.

With UE3 and Flash, games built for high-end consoles can now run on the Web or as Facebook apps, reaching an enormous user base,” said Sweeney. This totally changes the playing field for game developers who want to widely deploy and monetize their games.”

Develop has further analysis on this story.