Two classic first-person shooters preserved by fans
by Ian Walker
Unreal, the first-person shooter that introduced Unreal Engine to the world, and its multiplayer-focused follow-up Unreal Tournament have been preserved via the Internet Archive and are freely available for download with the blessing of developer Epic Games.
Old Unreal first shared the news with its longstanding community of diehard Unreal fans on October 29 and, more recently, released special installers that streamline the process of getting these decades-old games ready to play on modern Windows operating systems. Of course, getting online will take further finagling — neither game has had official servers since Epic shut them down on January 24, 2023 — but community servers are still plentiful.
“We can confirm that Unreal and Unreal Tournament are available on Archive.org and people are free to independently link to and play these versions,” an Epic spokesperson told Polygon.
Unreal debuted in 1998. Designed by Cliff Bleszinski, who would go on to games like Gears of War and LawBreakers, and programmed by Tim Sweeney, the now-billionaire founder and CEO of Epic Games, the first-person shooter was an almost immediate hit thanks to its detailed graphics and fast-paced gameplay. Unreal Tournament followed in 1999, shifting the focus to multiplayer arenas and leading to multiple sequels. A reboot of sorts was planned but never moved past a 2014 public pre-alpha that ended in 2017, due to Epic’s development priorities shifting to Fortnite. And we all know how that turned out.
Despite a complete disappearance from the zeitgeist, unfortunately helped along by Epic itself delisting the games from all online storefronts when the servers were taken down in 2023, the Unreal series is an iconic piece of video game history that’s worth preserving for future generations. And while dedicated fans will always be ready to step in and do the hard work to save these abandoned classics, it’s great to see a major corporation like Epic at the very least do nothing to stymie those efforts.
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