These Two Classic Shooters Just Became Completely Free, Forever

Epic, now primarily known for Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, has given permission for two of the most significant video games ever made, Unreal and Unreal Tournament, to be freely accessed via the Internet Archive. As spotted by RPS, via ResetEra, the OldUnreal group announced the move on their Discord, along with instructions for how to easily download and play them on modern machines.

It’s hard to convey just what a significant moment it was, in 1997-98, when Quake II and Unreal came out within six months of each other. Marking Epic’s entry into the graphics arms race with id Software, the two games were both utterly brilliant shooters in their own rights, but also became the names behind the engines on which a generation of games would be built. Half-Life was based on the Quake engine, while Unreal’s was under the hood of Deus Ex.

What also made them special is that both Epic and id were developers who grew up with an understanding of the importance of shareware, free software, and putting source code into the public domain. It’s why anyone can use those engines, and many later iterations of them, to create their games, free, without license or restriction. There are many publishers who are so ludicrously obsessed with maintaining a death-grip around their most ancient software that they will sue anyone who dares touch it (cough-Nintendo-cough), and all attempts to preserve games they refuse to support are met with outrageous hostility. Epic, for whatever other faults you may wish to level, is not like this, and while it should be commonplace, instead it’s a rare joy to see something like the 26-year-old Unreal so freely and willingly shared.

Screenshot: Internet Archive / Kotaku

Meanwhile, the backbone of the internet, the wonderful Internet Archive, has been through an awful time of late. In October, the site was the target of a massive hacking campaign, taking it offline for weeks, meaning the world lost access to vital resources like the Wayback Machine, which stores archived versions of almost every website on the internet (approximately 835 billion pages), and its enormous catalogs of books, software, films, music, and art.

At the same time, the vast monopolies that control copyrights have started turning their evil eyes toward the project, with a gruesome court ruling in September rejecting the Archive’s appeal against a decision that would shut down its ability to “lend” books to its users. (Something triggered by the IA’s amazing project during covid lockdowns to allow multiple versions of the same e-book to be read by users, in a project called The National Emergency Library.) In the wake of this savage blow, more will be coming for it, claiming its goals of preserving humanity’s creations are somehow a violation of their “intellectual property.”

Screenshot: Epic / Kotaku

So, given all this awfulness, it’s really rather wonderful to see the opposite happening. If you want to play Unreal (and you should! It’s still so good!), you need only visit this site (and yes, it does look like some 2002 keygen piracy site, but I promise it isn’t), and download the ‘unreal_gold.zip’ file (I’ve done this, virus checked it, run it, you’re all good), and it’ll automagically pull the ISO files from the Internet Archive and install them on your machine, without you having to go through all the guff of mounting an imaginary disc drive and so on.

The same applies for pioneering online multiplayer game Unreal Tournament.

Huge kudos to Epic for being cool with this, because while it shouldn’t be unusual to happily let people freely share a three-decade-old game you don’t sell any more, it’s vanishingly rare. And if you remain in any doubt, we just got word back from Epic confirming they’re on board.

“We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org,” a spokesperson told us by email, “and people are free to independently link to and play these versions.”

Also, give every spare penny you can to support Internet Archive—it’s one of the last truly good things on the internet.

Updated: 11/14/2024, 12:32 p.m. ET: Added Epic’s brief statement confirming their endorsement of this to Kotaku.

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