Have you ever thought to yourself, "Gosh, I've heard such good things about the classic 1998 shooter Unreal and sure would like to try it, but I just don't know where to get it these days?" If so, I have good news: The Internet Archive has made it free, along with the multiplayer follow-up Unreal Tournament, and it has Epic's blessing to do so.
Word of the newly-free Unreal games was first shared at the end of October on the OldUnreal Discord, but it didn't come to wider attention until the news was shared on Resetera. An Epic spokesperson subsequently confirmed that it has given the green light for the games to be hosted on the Internet Archive, telling PC Gamer, "We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org and people are free to independently link to and play these versions."
I was always more of a Quake man than an Unreal guy, but there's no denying the importance of the games. Unreal looked, well, unreal, but it was the editor bundled with the game that really locked its place in videogame history. Unreal Tournament was an even bigger deal, with dramatically improved "Internet play," as we called it at the time—an element of first-person shooters that has proved rather durable over the years.
Given all that, it's ironic that Epic's efforts to bring back UT failed so dramatically. A new game was announced with great fanfare in 2014, but despite early promise the runaway success of Fortnite convinced Epic to pull the plug.
If UT doesn't have much of a future, at least its past is well preserved. You can download and install Unreal and Unreal Tournament directly by snagging the files from the Internet Archive and then getting the patches to run it on current Windows systems from Github, all of which is detailed in full on the OldUnreal Discord. Or you can save yourself a lot of headaches by grabbing new installers from oldunreal.com—here are direct links to Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament—and letting them do the work.
I tried it, and it works: The blast of text in the DOS window that pops up during the install process was momentarily alarming, but with a few clicks (and no need to understand what "mount the game disc" means) I was off and running in Unreal Gold.
Bear in mind that Unreal and UT are very old, and so there's some unavoidable oddness at play. The default 640x480 resolution is pretty funky on 4K displays, and you will immediately notice that the mouse is inverted out of the box, which was the style at the time. It also uses the arrow keys for movement—if you want to use WASD (or whatever other Totally Normal Person system you've cooked up) you'll need to do some key remapping.
But it runs, it's free, and maybe most notably it comes at a time when game preservation efforts are running up against serious opposition from companies and organizations who are determined to stymie efforts to keep old games accessible and playable. It's not as though Epic was making any bank on them anyway—they were removed from sale along with a bunch of other old Epic games a couple years ago—so there's little here to lose, but even so I think Epic deserves props for doing something cool. Maybe it'll even inspire other game makers to follow suit.
