During a Q & A session following a demonstration of the Unreal Engine 3 at GDC last week, Epic Games Vice President Mark Rein mentioned the difficulties in bringing the middleware engine to Nintendo’s next generation console - Nintendo Revolution.

“It won’t be easy to take something HD res here to the Revolution,” Rein noted. He continued by saying we probably “won’t be seeing Unreal Engine 3 on the Revolution.”

Rein did make clear that he has not seen final Revolution hardware. However, he did cite Unreal Engine 2 as possessing ample graphical power to take full advantage of Revolution’s hardware, as that particular build of the engine does not require HD resolution.

Back in November, Rein commented that “Unreal Engine 3 and that Nintendo Revolution would be very well suited to each other,” assuming the machine was powerful enough to handle the engine. It’s possible Epic Games managed to acquire a Revolution SDK and discovered the machine to be incompatible with its latest Unreal technology. However, since the development kits are still unfinalized, some time is needed before concrete announcements can be made.