Two beloved 90s shooters are being preserved online for free with Epic Games’ approval-Michael Beckwith-Entertainment – Metro

These games were delisted in 2022 (Epic Games)

Two classic but defunct shooters have found new life thanks to a dedicated team of fans and a seal of approval from the games’ publisher.

While 1998’s Unreal followed in the footsteps of id Software’s Quake, it’s still one of the most important first person shooters ever made. Not least because its technology formed the basis of the Unreal Engine graphics technology, new iterations of which are still used across the industry today.

Follow-up Unreal Tournament helped to lay the groundwork for modern online shooters but they were both primarily PC games and never had the mainstream impact of Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. Publisher Epic Games eventually stopped making new iterations – to concentrate on Unreal Engine, Gears Of War, and Fortnite – and so today the entire franchise is largely forgotten.

Epic delisted and shut down the servers for all the Unreal games in 2022, and while there was once talk of a new one as far back as 2014, it never happened. But now the series has returned, and it’s all thanks to fans and the Internet Archive.

In lieu of any official remasters from Epic, a group of fans have opted to preserve the original Unreal and Unreal Tournament on the Internet Archive. And apparently Epic itself is okay with that.

This is according to OldUnreal, the team dedicated to preserving the Unreal games. In an update on their Discord server (which has since made the rounds on other sites like Reddit), they reveal that Epic has given permission for the team to host the two games on the Internet Archive’s website.

The specific games in question are Unreal Gold, a re-release of the first game that includes new single-player missions, and Unreal Tournament: Game Of The Year Edition, which also comes with all of the original game’s expansion packs.

While OldUnreal can’t host the two games on its own website, apparently it can provide installers, so you don’t have to download the games directly from the Internet Archive. You can find the installer for Unreal Gold here and the installer for Unreal Tournament here.

Basically, they extract all the necessary data and patches to get the games running on modern PCs. At the time of writing, you can get the games working on current Windows operating systems, but OldUnreal is working on Linux and macOS compatibility too.

So, not only are the games available to play again, but they’re also free, making this quite the win for long-time Unreal fans. Especially if the online multiplayer works as it should.

Ideally, new players will be tempted to check the games out too and, in a perfect world, revitalise interest in the series enough to convince Epic to make a new one.

The original Unreal is still worth playing today (Epic Games)

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