by Key takeaways
- The Internet Archive has made it possible to download and play the classic arena shooters Unreal and Unreal Tournament for free.
- Although the official servers were shut down in 2023, the games have been patched by the devoted OldUnreal community to function perfectly on contemporary PCs.
- Epic affirmed that users can freely link to and play these versions on their own, supporting the preservation efforts.
Thanks to the Internet Archive, two groundbreaking games that contributed to the emergence of the online multiplayer first-person shooter craze—Unreal and Unreal Tournament—have been given new life and are now publicly accessible for download and play.
These Epic Games titles, which were released in 1998 and 1999, respectively, were visual masterpieces for their era. While Unreal Tournament was an early online multiplayer sensation because of its fast-paced deathmatch action, Unreal dazzled with its state-of-the-art graphics and captivating single-player narrative.
Their influence paved the way for today’s immensely popular competitive shooter series, such as Battlefield, Call of Duty, and, of course, Epic’s battle royale powerhouse, Fortnite.
Enthusiastic Fan Base
Unfortunately, however, with Unreal Tournament 3 in 2007, the Unreal series progressively disappeared from public consciousness. In 2014, an ambitious new installment was revealed with great hype in an effort to bring the series back to life. However, Epic later canceled that in favor of Fortnite.
Fortunately, the original games could still be played.until 2022, when Epic titles declared it will be closing its servers for older titles.
That ought to have made those masterpieces obsolete, but a dedicated community group called OldUnreal has been putting in a lot of effort to keep them alive for contemporary platforms. Their efforts have made it possible to launch these games in 2024 with just a few clicks.
Methods for Playing
Here, you have a few choices. The more complex approach is to get the original game files from the Internet Archive and then separately download patches created by the community from places like GitHub or the OldUnreal Discord server instructions. However, we advise doing the simpler path: Download the latest pre-patched installer packages from the OldUnreal website.
In a statement to Polygon, Epic even granted users the ability to “independently link to and play these versions,” ensuring that they won’t be taken down.
