Epic Games has given the green light for fans to grab Unreal and Unreal Tournament, both born from Epic’s famed Unreal engine, for free through the Internet Archive.
Back in the late 90s, Unreal and its sequel, focused on multiplayer, shook up the gaming scene just as first-person shooters and online gaming were getting huge. Quake 2, which came out in 1997, set the stage for online multiplayer, and Unreal jumped right in. The series saw many sequels, ending with Unreal Tournament 3 in 2007. In 2014, Epic teased fans with a pre-alpha version of a new Unreal Tournament, but by 2018, they scrapped it to focus on their mega-hit, Fortnite.
Now, thanks to a group of dedicated fans called Old Unreal, these classic games have been saved. After being removed from stores in 2023 when Epic shut down their servers, Old Unreal made it super easy to download and play them on today’s computers. Even though there aren’t official servers anymore, you can still find community ones to jump into some multiplayer action in 2024.
Fans are happy Epic is cool with people playing these games on Archive.org, saying folks can “freely link to and play these versions.”
Epic hasn’t been stingy with its older games before. In 2018, they gave away $12 million worth of assets from Paragon, their old MOBA game, for anyone using Unreal Engine, leading to new Paragon-inspired games.
