Celebrating 15 Years of Unreal with a Steam Sale!

When the lights go out in that hallway one by one… That was stomach churning!

The first fav moment is when you leave Vortex Rikers for the first time and you see the huge and gorgeous landscape and you hear that beautiful soundtrack. The second fav moment is a scary one, when the lights go out, one by one, then the skaarjwarrior jumps on your back and that techno kicks in, one of the most memorable things in PC gaming history. Aaand of course the first battle with a titan, truly an “epic” (pun intended) battle! And of course the final boss battle isn’t a walk in the park, especially on “unreal” difficulty. I have spent about 230 hours playing this game and all of those hours are in single player. I’ve played it on hard difficulty about 10 times and on Unreal difficulty about 6-7 times and I still cannot get bored of this. I just LOVE it. Thank you Epic Games for making my childhood the best childhood one can have!

My favourite moment was pulling off a triple kill with the shock combo. Made me feel like a bad ass

How to forget the… “MO MO MO MOMONSTER KILL” hahahaha

it would be EPIC to see unreal 1 revamped to the modern engine. Unreal 1 was and will forever be the best damn unreal in the franchise! Played this game for weeks on end. Was awesome!

I still play the original Unreal game. Such an awesome game.

heck, Unreal was the first game I ever bought for my computer (ok really the first game I bought for a computer was Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for the Apple IIe, but that was a loonnnggg time ago) and I has completely flabbergasted by the game play and graphics, ahh the graphics were phenomenal, and it was really hard going back to Saga and the like for games.

Unreal Tpurnament was my foirst PC Game and I still play it. All this awesome bunny hopping maps and this good old fast shooter action just amazing.

Being just a little lad who came home every day to play UT99 on his dad pc till my dad had to kick me off

Survivors of UT2004, seek us in Facebook

Unreal is my favourite game of all time, and the moment of leaving the ship and seeing this beautiful sky, together with the magical music, the waterfalls, the little pond and the fish, unforgettable. Then the mixed feelings when you discover the corpses all around, ingenious. The music still haunts me. It was THE moment of my gaming history. I wish there’d be a modern Unreal game with the same amount of exploration on a beautiful alien world. *listens to Dusk Horizon now*

Some of my most favourite moments happened in botmatches, too. The darkmatch was incredibly atmospheric, all the maps had amazing designs. This game had everything. It’s a shame that Epic focusses too much on the engine only these days.

UT4 was the game that got me into the FPS scene. Unreal has made a huge impact on gaming in the last 15 years :D.

Actually, my most memorable moment would probably be the level(s) where you had to drain the water on the ship. You hit the button to drain the water, the level pauses, loads a NEW level where the water is lower, and much to my amazement I was standing in the same exact spot, AND all the items I had/hadn’t collected, enemies I killed, and so forth were all in the exact same spots. I ran around the whole map just to check that.

People today just don’t respect how awesome that was. Games didn’t save large amounts of data like that between levels; you didn’t walk into a new level and start where you were in the last level. Back then, levels were completely independent entities.

Finding the Flak Cannon inside that Nali church and getting that feeling that things were finally about to start going my way.

My favorite part of Unreal was the ISV Kran. Exploring that scary atmospheric wreck brought out all kinds of thinking on my part – about what happened to the crew stationed aboard, if any of them actually survived, etc. The translator messages in those levels really helped set the mood (we’re all gonna die!, etc.) I must have played through Unreal at least twenty times and the Kran was always the highlight of the trip.

@Caleb Child – The levels you’re thinking of are Terraniux, the mercenary ship. Also a great set of levels in Unreal 😀

My favorite moment is finally learning the fate of the final Vortex Rikers crew member at Bluff Eversmoking.

There had been sporadic journal entries from the deceased crew’s PDAs all throughout the game, and it was fascinating being able to read a story-within-a-story with real human elements, all without anyone saying a single word. It’s design such as this, that make Unreal 1998 such a better story experience than the linear and focused set piece experiences of today’s games.

Ascending the Spire, and climbing into the atmospheric elevator is a close second. Unreal is so special because it could combine twitch FPS action with a sense of real mystery and exploration. The original DOOM, as exquisite as it is, just didn’t have things like that.

I loved everything about Unreal: true sci-fi. It was mostly about the world/exploration for me. It really felt like a strange, isolated world in the middle of the cold universe. It’s strange but what I remember most about Unreal was the sky. I just spanned out into the distance and made me dream about what was beyond the horizon. I wish it never would have ended. I <3 Unreal.

Unreal was the dawn of a new age for me in gaming. It is what elevated me from a casual console player to a hardcore PC gamer. The seemingly boundless and immersive universe of Unreal captivated me like no other game has, nor ever will. Unreal Tournament 99, to this day, is still my favorite game of all time. I still play it with passion, enthusiasm, and love. Without fail, it always manages to surprise me with that spark of joy that nothing but Unreal can create. I frequently look back on the first time I played Unreal with unparalleled fondness and nostalgia. I can easily segment my life into temporal blocks corresponding with the subsequent releases of Unreal games over the years. Unreal is more than just a game, its an identity. I also must say, that I respect and love the staff of Epic. To Mr. Tim Sweeney, you are an inspiration and are the truest pioneer of gaming. After following your work, your innovations, and your presentations over the years, I am continually awestricken and inspired by your genius and vision. You have my greatest respect and professional admiration out of anyone in the industry. I enthusiastically await your next great work. And to everyone at Epic, you guys have provided my friends, family, and myself with 15 incredibly UNREAL years of Unreal! With my sincerest and most heartfelt wishes, I hope that both Epic and Unreal games persist and grow for the rest of time.

congrats, i hope to see it something new in this universe

Still want a new UT game with Unreal Engine 4!

Nice post Flak. Your community thanks you 😀

For anyone thinking of revisiting Unreal, do yourself a favour and play it with all the new updates and replacements.
Your new modern hardware, with Unreal brought up-to-date, is … EPIC and Unreal !
https://my.opera.com/Unreal-Tournament/blog/unreal

Just loved the Athmosphere of this Game. The sense of wonder and exploration. The sense of being alone in a hostile world. The Music! Unfortunately this got pretty much lost under all the story bshit in Unreal2. It’s not what made the first Unreal great. I reeeeeeally really hope Epic get’s it’s shit together and creates a new Unreal Game with a modern engine that can live up to it’s legacy that started 15 years ago with a bang.

Oh God, to pick a favorite…This will sound so self-centered but the highlight for me was the first time I went on a public server I didn’t directly know and they were running something I had modded. I truly love the Unreal world and to know that I could contribute directly to it opened up an entire world for me that has lasted two marriages, three kids, and a decade-n-half of the best gaming and friends ever.

I’m surprised too that I didn’t see anyone select the castle fly-by title screen. It had it all: great detail, intrigue, little peeks inside. All the while you got to fly around it and guess at what was waiting for you. I still remember the very first time I saw “LOADING” across the castle as I was joining my initial coop server.

Thank you Epic, it has meant so much. And to you too Flak for keeping the torch for us.
-gopostal

15 years!

I don’t want to wait ANOTHER 15 YEARS. Time to bring back the goddess of FPS!

Unreal for me is still the most groundbreaking moment in gaming. I followed the development of it with great hope and bought extra copies the day it came out to hand out as gifts. I started out playing it using software rendering but I fondly remember a running through the crowd with a friend at the opening of a local computer expo to fight our way to the vendor we new would be stocked with Voodoo 2 cards. Turns out he had the only two in the entire show! I’m sure my jaw dropped witnessing Unreal with a Voodoo card for the first time. The combination of 3D acceleration and Unreal was, well, Epic!

Well there is lousy timing for you !
“Ultimate Game Server will be closing its operation on June 24th 2013”
https://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1369396917
Loads of Unreal servers are about to go offline

hello …

good old times

cheers!

15th Anniversary, Na Pali, Prisoner 849, Skaarj, soundtrack, Unreal, Vortex Rikers

UNREAL is just the best game. The soundtrack kicks ass, the game is huge. I remember playing this game for the first time, spending hours playing and all my waking hours when I wasn’t playing the game I was thinking about the game, like, what’s going to happen next? What will the next part of the game look like? etc. When I finally did finish the game it was with mixed emotions. A sense of achievement to have finished the game but sad because there was no more to the game besides playing it again…and again…and again.

it was almost 15 years ago today, Unreal taught this grrl how ta play…

shes been goin in and outta style, but shes guaranteed to frag for awhile,

so lemme introduce to you, the game we loved for all these years UT UT UT!!!
…so I got into Unreal a little less than a year after it debuted and just loved the SP, but when I discovered the multiplayer game, I never looked back…

One of my fave moments in original Unreal was finally getting a handle on the Rocket Launcher and running down a long open area firing away at other players and watching them gib! Jumping off a bridge and raining rockets on unsuspecting players :p and then realizing half the damage had been caused by another player helping me from behind

Single player was chok full o great maps, Nali Castle, Vandoras Temple, Bluff Eversmoking… there was something fun about swimming and fragging in Unreal too, cant quite put the flak on it, but it was always fun!
Thank you EPIC and everyone involved in Unreal and UT!!!

Viva oldschool FPS! Unreal Tournament rocks!! m/