Commercially successful games usually score high with their perfect blend of breathtaking graphics, well-animated characters, realistic lighting, spectacular sound, and convincing effects. These features all can be developed from the bottom up; nowadays, game engines come into play in this process. Game engines can cater to 2D or 3D graphics, and some come complete with the necessary development modules.

The graphics engine takes care of textures, lighting effects, object animation, and so on. The physics engine ensures that the game objects conform to physical behavioral rules (rigid-body physics)  – which also applies to liquids. The sound system ensures a full sound so the player feels a part of the action. Further modules can handle network coordination, provide a scripting interface, and control the opponent's level of intelligence. Although some engines provide all these things, others are more specialized.

If you search online at the MobyGames website [1], you'll find 139 different game engines, but very few support Linux. Linux was always a niche market, so porting and cross-platform programming was not a priority for most gaming companies. Moreover, development was primarily for Windows and DirectX graphics interfaces – Linux users gazed into the void. Although many games ran – and still do run – under Wine, support was poor, and performance compared with Windows was clearly limited.

[...]