SAN FRANCISCO—At a GDC keynote presentation Wednesday, Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney showed off plenty of Unreal Engine-powered games and highlighted how developers would soon be able to build those games in a fully virtual reality editor. But the more surprising focus of his talk was the growing use of Unreal Engine 4 outside of gaming for everything from film editing to architectural planning.

“What the camera was to the 20th century, the engine is today,” Sweeney said. “The media world is converging into a digital content industry… where the engine is the thing that links [different media] together in an interoperable world.”

The most stunning example of this cross-media collaboration came in a gripping cut scene from Hellblade developer Ninja Theory. The highly detailed shot highlighted Celtic warrior protagonist Senua, fighting through deep psychosis and trauma on a vision quest into a Viking heartland. As Senua tried to shake off disturbing, fiery visions of hanging corpses, the camera zoomed in on her face, illuminating every tiny mouth twitch and body shiver that served as an outward sign of her internal struggle.