Epic Games Acquires Agog Labs and 3Lateral for Undisclosed Amounts

Epic Games appears to be on a head hunt, as they acquire both Agog Labs and 3Lateral for an undisclosed sum recently.

Announced earlier this week, we knew about Agog's acquisition last December via the company LinkedIn page. The lab is best known for winning the Unreal Dev Grant in 2015, and for developing an AI, gameplay, and high-level stage direction scripting solution and command script called SkookumScript.

3Lateral is a Serbia based graphics firm. They're known best for their realistic animation and modeling of human characters. They also have a history with Epic, having collaborated on an animated short called A Boy and His Kite and the Digital demon Andy Serkis performance demo for the Unreal Engine.

Agog will be ceasing development on SkookumScript to work on "exciting new projects" alongside Epic Games. The script will remain a community supported plugin for Unreal Engine 4, however.

Conan Reis, CEO of Agog Labs had the following to say:
 

"Here at Agog Labs our goal has always been to create authoring and development tools that allow people to focus on bringing their passionate imaginings to life.
. . .
We melt our brains so you don't have to. Epic has the same goals and spark of mad science, which makes it easy to align our paths. We're honored to become part of the Epic family."

3Lateral, on the other hand, will not be stopping their work with other companies and partners in the video game, film, and tv industries. Though now, they will also be "working to advance the state of the art in Unreal Engine's support for virtual humans and creatures."

Founder and director Vladimir Mastilovic had this to say.

"Creating digital humans requires deep understanding of every aspect of our appearance and motion, both of which portray our inner self and tell stories around us. We read all these visual cues with great precision as instinct to analyse an image of another human being is deeply embedded in our DNA.
. . .
Observing, analysing and reconstructing these mechanisms has always fascinated us at 3Lateral, and we are excited to have joined a like-minded team at Epic Games with such strong desire to solve this near impossible problem."

Epic is really becoming an industry giant at this point, aren't they?