Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament are now free on the Internet Archive, and Epic says that's A-okay

GamesFPSUnreal Gold and Unreal Tournament are now free on the Internet Archive, and Epic says that’s A-okayWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Epic)

A woman flees a monster in Unreal.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Gosh, I’ve heard such good things about the classic 1998 shooter Unreal and sure would like to try it, but I just don’t know where to get it these days?” If so, I have good news: TheInternet Archivehas made it free, along with the multiplayer follow-up Unreal Tournament, and it has Epic’s blessing to do so.

Word of the newly-free Unreal games was first shared at the end of October on theOldUnreal Discord, but it didn’t come to wider attention until the news was shared onResetera. An Epic spokesperson subsequently confirmed that it has given the green light for the games to be hosted on the Internet Archive, telling PC Gamer, “We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org and people are free to independently link to and play these versions.”

I was always more of a Quake man than an Unreal guy, but there’s no denying the importance of the games. Unreal looked, well, unreal, but it was theeditor bundled with the gamethat really locked its place in videogame history. Unreal Tournament was an even bigger deal, with dramatically improved “Internet play,” as wecalled it at the time—an element of first-person shooters that has proved rather durable over the years.

Given all that, it’s ironic that Epic’s efforts to bring back UT failed so dramatically. A new game wasannounced with great fanfarein 2014, but despite early promise the runaway success of Fortnite convinced Epic topull the plug.

I tried it, and it works: The blast of text in the DOS window that pops up during the install process was momentarily alarming, but with a few clicks (and no need to understand what “mount the game disc” means) I was off and running in Unreal Gold.

Bear in mind that Unreal and UT are very old, and so there’s some unavoidable oddness at play. The default 640x480 resolution is pretty funky on 4K displays, and you will immediately notice that the mouse is inverted out of the box, which was the style at the time. It also uses the arrow keys for movement—if you want to use WASD (or whatever otherTotally Normal Person systemyou’ve cooked up) you’ll need to do some key remapping.

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But it runs, it’s free, and maybe most notably it comes at a time when game preservation efforts are running up against seriousopposition from companies and organizationswho are determined to stymie efforts to keep old games accessible and playable. It’s not as though Epic was making any bank on them anyway—they wereremoved from salealong with a bunch of other old Epic games a couple years ago—so there’s little here to lose, but even so I think Epic deserves props for doing something cool. Maybe it’ll even inspire other game makers to follow suit.

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