Epic Games is expanding their reach once again. The Unreal, Unreal Tournament and Gears of War developer (and creators of the much used Unreal Engine) have just announced they have purchased Utah-based Chair Entertainment. Specific financial details were not disclosed.

Chair Entertainment was formed in 2005 by Donald and Geremy Mustard. They previously worked at GlyphX, who developed the sci-fi action game Advent Rising (which used Epic's Unreal Engine 2). So far the only game Chair has released was the Xbox Live Arcade game Undertow (which used Unreal Engine 3) but they have already announced plans to develop a game based onthe "Battle Room" scenarios in Ender's Game, the classic sci-fi novel from writer Orson Scott Card. Chair also helped to develop Empire, a near future concept of a second American Civil War that Card wrote up as a novel of the same name in 2006 (a video game and movie are also in development)

The press release announcing the deal revealed that Chair Entertainment would continue to work under that name and will continue to develop new and original properties while using, naturally, Epic's Unreal Engine tech. This is the second time Epic has purchased a game developer. In 2007 it purchased Painkiller developer People Can Fly who helped Epic with the PC port of Gears of War and is currently working on a new and unannounced game.