Bandai Namco Studios – developer of the Tekken, Tales of, and Ace Combat series, recently teased its new proprietary game engine. In an update on X from June 12, the company shared photos of its new employees receiving training on the engine.
This is likely the first update on Bandai Namco Studio’s in-house game engine since its initial announcement in 2022. At the time, the company revealed that it had begun full-scale development of the new engine in 2019, with a re-boot happening in 2020. Assembling a team of over 50 engineers headed by former Ubisoft and Square Enix technical director Julien Mercenon as CTO, Bandai Namco Studios set out to build an engine capable of large-scale development, including open-world games.
Although there has barely been any word about the project since then, it seems development of the engine has progressed significantly in the meantime, enough for new employees to train and create games on it.
The foundations of Bandai Namco Studios yet-unnamed engine originate from their proprietary “NU Library.” Nu Library is a custom graphics/rendering middleware created by Namco engineers in the PS2 era and subsequently expanded to multiple platforms. The library was used in the development of Tekken and Ace Combat games, but since it was merely a rendering framework, it was missing many essential functionalities of a typical game engine. As such, the developers had to create custom editors and tools from scratch for each game. The idea of creating a full-fledged in-house game engine came from their wish to unify all these independently developed tools.
While Bandai Namco Studios has been using engines like Unity and Unreal Engine for recent titles, one of its goals is to free itself from relying on third party software for the foundations of its games, so we might be seeing their new engine in action soon.
