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Unreal is a single-player first-person shooter computer game which was
published on Memorial Day 1998 by
Epic Games. It was powered by the Unreal engine which had been in development for over three years before the game was released.
Premise
In the original title you take the part of a criminal aboard a prison transport spacecraft which has crash-landed on the
planet Na Pali. The natives of this planet have been subjugated by a collection or alliance of alien races, primarily
the Skaarj. Your primary goal is to locate
and destroy the alien mothership and escape the planet.
Early development
The Unreal game engine was seen as a major rival to id Software's Quake engine, and the
Unreal game itself was considered to be technically superior to the Quake and Quake II titles which were out on the market at the same time. Since Unreal came packaged with
its own scripting language called UnrealScript, it soon developed a large
community on the Internet which was able to add new modifications (also called mods) in order to change or enhance gameplay. This feature greatly
added to the overall longevity of the product and provided an incentive for new development.
The Unreal Tournament series
Unreal Tournament 2003
Epic Games' 1999 follow-up title was called Unreal Tournament
and focused mainly on multiplayer action: It was launched in direct
competition to id's Quake III Arena. As with the original
Unreal, the ease with which players could create and release modifications to the core game was a key factor
contributing to Unreal Tournament's longevity. UT improved upon the mod-friendly nature of its predecessor with
the inclusion of support for mutators, which allowed users to easily integrate small amounts of code into the core game
with a minimal effort, for example to cause players' heads to increase in size with each frag and decrease in size with each death. Players could then simply check a box to enable or disable the mutator.
This allowed for fine-tuning of the game experience to a degree not generally possible with traditional full-scale
modifications.
Unreal and Unreal Tournament saw sequels released in 2002, entitled Unreal II
(developed by Legend Entertainment for the PC and Tantalus Interactive for the Xbox) and Unreal
Tournament 2003. Unreal Tournament 2003 had a name change from the expected Unreal Tournament II
in order to imitate traditional sports-based video games, where annual releases are typical. Unreal Tournament 2003
dropped the venerable Assault gametype of the original Unreal Tournament, adding the new Bombing Run mode to take its
place. The game had a brief period of popularity, but did not enjoy the same level of success as its predecessor.
As part of Epic Games' strategy of porting the Unreal engine to other platforms,
Unreal Championship, a sister product to Unreal Tournament 2003, was released in November 2002
for the Xbox.
On February 11, 2004, the demo for Unreal Tournament 2004 was made available for download over the
Internet. Within a few hours of its release it had become one of the most popular online games. The full version was made
available on March 18, 2004 and could be
purchased as either six CDs, one DVD, or on two DVDs (containing both the game and an extra disk of bonus content) as part of the "Special Edition"
release (which was completely sold-out in a very short space of time - There were only 60,000 copies made for global
distribution). It was later released on 13 April 2004, as a DVD Edition containing both of the Special Edition DVDs, but without the metal box covering & headset.
It expanded on the team-based theme of its predecessor with the reintroduction of Assault (last seen in Unreal
Tournament), the addition of a new gametype called Onslaught, and the inclusion of several futuristic vehicles. The game
featured built-in voice-comms and contained over one hundred separate maps, many of which were carried over from Unreal
Tournament 2003.
Unreal Tournament 2004
Release dates of Unreal titles
See also
- Other games which use the Unreal Engine
External links
General Unreal-related websites:
Popular Unreal community web sites:
Popular Unreal modifications:
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