Epic Games has given the OK for their 1998 shooter Unreal to be hosted on the Internet Archive, essentially making the classic sci-fi alien blaster free, and preserving it for the future. They’ve also given the same permission for Unreal Tournament to be hosted there too, making free the multiplayer muckabout that spawned speedier and speedier sequels throughout the early 2000s (not to mention the origin of one of the most memorable multiplayer FPS maps of all time, Facing Worlds).
Epic gave permission for this very recently, say fan group Old Unreal (as spotted by the folks on ResetEra). That fan site are leading the way in making the now-free games easier to download and install. Archive.org is great, but it’s not always the most user friendly of libraries. So the gang of Skaarj custodians have created two installers that will do everything for you. Here’s one for Unreal Gold and one for Unreal Tournament.
These basically slurp the .iso files from the Internet Archive’s server and run everything necessary to get the games installed on modern machines. I tested it for Unreal Tournament and, yup, everything looks lovely. You’ll still need to do some extra steps to play online with others, though, say the Old Unreal gang.
Epic Games delisted the first Unreal from Steam a couple of years ago, along with all other Unreal games. The reasons for this are obvious, considering Epic has its own store that directly competes with Steam. It still annoyed some people though. Maybe now that two of these games are totally free, no questions asked, that move can be forgiven. We are recently seeing some moves here and there towards game preservation, such as GOG renewing their vows to making classic games playable on modern PCs. And this isn’t the first time Epic gave their original shootso away for free (although that was a temporary birthday celebration). But yes. All this is generally good. Free games are good.
Unreal, for its part, was an important and impressive bit of blastin’ at the time of release. It scared me to death. But that’s okay, I confronted those fears years later by asking various members of the development team what it was like to make back in 1998. Short answer? People worked 70-80 hour work weeks, and made some nice alien cows.