From the web page:
The idea of code reuse has existed for quite some time, yet development shops in the game industry lagged behind their counterparts from other fields in adopting it.
I actually think this is partly untrue. At least I noticed it FIRST in games back in the early 80's. Infocom used the Z-machine virtual machine or "engine" to run their popular text adventures. Sierra also had a few game engines to power stuff like Kings Quest.
It's not exactly the same thing, but the concept of a game engine was in wide use 20 years ago, at least for adventure style games. I don't know about fast-action side scrollers or other unique games though.
Anyway the project sounds all right. good luck with it.