Epic Games’ Founder, Technical Director, and CEO Tim Sweeney talked boatloads about the technical feats they’ve been able to reach between Gears 1 and Gears 2 in our extensive exclusive video interview, but also dropped a little bomb on Unreal Tournament fans.

While Cliff told us in his interview that Unreal would most likely get shelved for a while, Tim Sweeney pretty much confirmed it.

“Unreal Tournament is certainly a major long-term priority but we’re planning not to release a major retail game in the series for several years.  So we have that effort somewhat on hold while we work on a few other initiatives. “

For anyone who plays Unreal Tournament, the community is what has truly defined the game ever since Epic released their first moddable game in 1998. Sweeney even jokes that Unreal Tournament IV and V could be primarily made by the Unreal Tournament Community.

“The really interesting thing about Unreal Tournament is that once we’ve defined the game in this generation the community takes it and runs with it. So you’ve seen the community create this massive set of maps and mods that go far beyond anything we could ever do.  We almost solve the Unreal Tournament 4 and 5 problem ourselves by just making this toolset available because the community has done more than we could have ever hoped to do internally.”

With the Make Something Unreal Competition, why wouldn’t Epic want to take a LittleBigPlanet route and let the community take the helm with developing the major portion of the game? There’s some really fantastic mods currently available for Unreal Tournament III, and if you haven’t downloaded them for either the PC or PS3, I highly suggest you do. Like now.