Unreal and Unreal Tournament, the primary two titles to make use of developer Epic Video games’ now vastly standard Unreal engine and which spawned a whole FPS franchise, are actually out there to download and play for free through the Internet Archive. And sure, it is with Epic’s permission.
Launched in 1998, Unreal and its 1999 multiplayer-focused follow-up made a splash at a time when FPS titles and on-line multiplayer have been starting to catch hearth. Quake 2 launched in 1997 and spawned a web-based multiplayer phenomenon–one that Unreal was fast to observe up on. Epic’s graphically spectacular and fast-paced area shooter spawned a number of sequels, with the final, totally launched entry being 2007’s Unreal Tournament 3.
Epic did launch a pre-alpha construct for a brand new entry within the sequence, merely referred to as Unreal Tournament, again in 2014. Nevertheless, the sport was formally canceled in 2018 as Epic shifted all of its focus to its money-printing battle royale juggernaut, Fortnite.
The preservation of the 2 basic Unreal video games, which have been delisted from storefronts in 2023 when Epic shut down official servers for them alongside different older titles like Rock Band, is due to the work of a devoted fan neighborhood by the identify of Old Unreal. They’ve made the method of downloading and putting in the video games on trendy PCs so simple as a number of clicks of a mouse. Whereas there are now not official devoted servers and enjoying on-line multiplayer in every sport requires leaping via some further hoops, there are nonetheless neighborhood servers maintaining every shooter alive in 2024.
In a press release to Polygon, Epic confirmed that it’s not getting in the way in which of letting folks play the 2 basic Unreal titles out there on Archive.org, and stated persons are “free to independently hyperlink to and play these variations.”
It is not the primary time Epic has taken a extra forgiving stance with regards to a few of its older sport properties. Epic gave away an estimated $12 million of in-game belongings it constructed for its defunct MOBA Paragon in 2018 for anybody making initiatives in Unreal Engine to make use of, a few of which have been repurposed into a number of Paragon successors.