Looking beyond Half-Life, Quake, and Doom, we come across the Unreal saga. On one hand, we have the classic Unreal 1 from 1998, and on the other, Unreal Tournament, which gave rise to a very active online community. Over the years, both games have received all kinds of patches and mods, but legal ways to obtain them ended in December 2022. Instead of starting a new conflict, Epic Games granted official permission for their online distribution, and the folks at OldUnreal created installers special that use the Internet Archive images.
The original Unreal was one of those games that forced us to upgrade our hardware. In fact, my first experiments with SLI using two Voodoo2 cards were made possible thanks to Unreal, and watching the intro at 1024x768 justified any effort. In just a few years, we went from "fake 3D" to environments full of lights, shadows, advanced textures, and suffocating atmospheres. Unreal wasn't alone (it would be a mistake to ignore the first two Quake games), but it definitely took a leap in quality.
A year later came Unreal Tournament, and the shift to multiplayer was more than successful, despite stiff competition (Quake III Arena hit shelves ten days later). Fans of this particular universe didn't take long to optimize and mod both games, creating in turn a solid preservation path. That point is essential: With 26 years under its belt, it's virtually impossible to legally buy Unreal and Unreal Tournament today, but thanks to an Epic Games decision, we have great news: They are now freeware.
Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament Free on the Internet Archive
Now, the games had already been backed up on the Internet Archive (the upload date says January 2022 for Unreal, and June 2021 for Unreal Tournament), but from a technical-legal standpoint, downloading them could raise copyright issues. Fortunately, Epic Games gave the green light to this distribution channel, and both titles can be obtained without risk. The ISO images are available here and here, but that's not all: The OldUnreal team created installers special that handle downloading the images, extracting their contents to a folder, and applying the latest community patch (the stable build is 227i, with other options on the page).
From here, the sky is the limit. We have texture packs (in some cases ten times larger than the base game), additional maps, mutators, skins, and more. Links below!
Unreal and Unreal Tournament on the Internet Archive: Here and here
