Epic Games has been the Fortnite company for so long, it’s easy to forget that they had a rich curriculum vitae before battle royale was even a glint in Tim Sweeney’s eye. Today, it seems that Epic has seen it fit to let fans celebrate that legacy.
First, a little context. The Unreal engine that dominates the industry today was originally made for a video game franchise that was called Unreal. While the first Unreal games were single player 3D shooters in the vein of Quake, Epic soon found they had invented a new genre when they released the second game in the series, called Unreal Tournament.
Now, it’s not like Unreal Tournament was the original Fortnite, that would be nowhere close to being accurate. But it’s certainly true that Unreal Tournament took many of the important steps forward in PC gaming that would make it possible for Fortnite to exist. Among other things, the Unreal games came early with online multiplayer, and also console – PC cross platform multiplayer.
Knowing all this, it seems incredibly harsh for Epic to have chosen to delist all their Unreal games on all storefronts two years ago. As reported by PC Gamer, this all stems from Epic’s desire to focus on one online service system, the Epic Online Services that powers Fortnite. Now, it would be understandable if they simply stated that moving forward, gamers playing Unreal would have to set up their own peer to peer servers to keep playing online. But for whatever reason, Epic chose with one fell swoop to just delist all these previous games as well.
There were a lot of rumors and speculation around this, some of which revolved around their failed reboot of Unreal Tournament. We reported on this reboot that Epic was planning to build with their community in 2014. Three years later, Epic felt that they weren’t really able to make it come together and cancelled it. We don’t think that Epic was feeling vindictive per se. But they may have genuinely felt that there was nothing left to go back to for Unreal, even if there was a fan base who still wanted to play those games.
So, it is big news to learn that Epic allowed fans to redistribute some of these Unreal games again. As shared on Twitter by Brazilian user Vinícius Medeiros, the fansite OldUnreal received permission to redistribute Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament GOTY Edition.
If you do go to OldUnreal, you will find that this is actually a community with modders who have been updating this game to run on current generation PCs, and with new features. They explicitly explain that they did not get permission to host the games themselves on their own servers. But they are allowed to link to the game downloads from the Internet Archive. Twisted Voxel also confirmed that you can opt to get the original ISO files extracted from the CDs of these games, or get them bundled with OldUnreal’s installers. These installers will automatically get them working on modern PCs with their custom compatibility patches.
This does not seem like Epic is interested in putting the Unreal games back on the marketplace. While some fans are happy enough with the notion that these are free games from now on, it actually means that only a small segment of the gaming community will ever touch them. Still, this means those games can be played conveniently and legally, without having to take the trouble of finding your old discs and loading up your Windows ME build out of your basement. While we can’t seem to convince Epic to look back at a time before they were building their metaverse thing, at least we have this again.
