Unreal and Unreal Tournament, the first two titles to use developer Epic Games’ now hugely popular Unreal engine and which spawned an entire FPS franchise, are now available to download and play for free via the Internet Archive. And yes, it’s with Epic’s permission.
Released in 1998, Unreal and its 1999 multiplayer-focused follow-up made a splash at a time when FPS titles and online multiplayer were beginning to catch fire. Quake 2 released in 1997 and spawned an online multiplayer phenomenon–one that Unreal was quick to follow up on. Epic’s graphically impressive and fast-paced arena shooter spawned multiple sequels, with the last, fully released entry being 2007’s Unreal Tournament 3.
Epic did release a pre-alpha build for a new entry in the series, simply called Unreal Tournament, back in 2014. However, the game was officially canceled in 2018 as Epic shifted all of its focus to its money-printing battle royale juggernaut, Fortnite.
The preservation of the two classic Unreal games, which were delisted from storefronts in 2023 when Epic shut down official servers for them alongside other older titles like Rock Band, is thanks to the work of a dedicated fan community by the name of Old Unreal. They’ve made the process of downloading and installing the games on modern PCs as simple as a few clicks of a mouse. While there are no longer official dedicated servers and playing online multiplayer in each game requires jumping through some additional hoops, there are still community servers keeping each shooter alive in 2024.
In a statement to Polygon, Epic confirmed that it isn’t getting in the way of letting people play the two classic Unreal titles available on Archive.org, and said people are “free to independently link to and play these versions.”
It’s not the first time Epic has taken a more forgiving stance when it comes to some of its older game properties. Epic gave away an estimated $12 million of in-game assets it built for its defunct MOBA Paragon in 2018 for anyone making projects in Unreal Engine to use, some of which have been repurposed into multiple Paragon successors.