Epic, now best known for Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, has given approval to two of the most important video games of all time: Unreal And Unreal tournamentfreely accessible via the Internet Archive. As discovered by RPSabove ResetEraThe OldUnreal group announced the move on their Discord, along with instructions on how to easily download and play it on modern computers.
It’s hard to describe what a significant moment it was in 1997/98 Quake II And Unreal came out within six months. The two games marked Epic’s entry into the graphics arms race with id Software and were both absolutely brilliant shooters in their own right, but also became the names behind the engines upon which a generation of games would be built. Half-life was based on the Quake engine, while Unreal‘It was under the hood of Deus Ex.
What’s also special about them is that both Epic and id were developers who grew up with an understanding of the importance of shareware, free software and releasing source code to the public. For this reason, anyone can use these engines and many later iterations of them to create their games for free, without license or restrictions. There are many publishers who are so ridiculously obsessed with keeping hold of their oldest software that they sue anyone who dares touch it (cough-Nintendo-cough) and any attempts to preserve games that they Not wanting to support will be met with outrageous hostility. “Epic,” no matter what other faults you might want to clear up, isn’t like that, and while it should be commonplace, it’s a rare treat to see something like the 26-year-old Unreal shared so freely and willingly.
Meanwhile, the backbone of the Internet, the wonderful Internet Archive, has been going through a terrible time lately. In October, The website was the target of a massive hacking campaignwhich left it offline for weeks, meaning the world had no access to vital resources like that Wayback machinewhich stores archived versions of almost all websites on the Internet (approximately 835 billion pages) and its vast catalogs of books, software, films, music and art.
At the same time, the giant monopolies that control copyrights have begun to turn their evil eyes on the project a cruel court verdict in September, it rejected the archive’s appeal of a decision that would no longer allow it to “loan” books to its users. (Something sparked by the IA’s amazing project during the Corona lockdowns to allow users to read multiple versions of the same e-book, in a project called The National Emergency Library.) In the wake of this brutal blow, more and more will advocate for it and claim that its goals of preserving humanity’s creations are somehow a violation of their “intellectual property.”
In the face of all this awfulness, it’s truly wonderful to see the opposite happening. If you want to play Unreal (And you should! It’s still like that So good!), all you need is Visit this page (And yes, it does look like a keygen piracy site from 2002, but I promise that’s not the case) and download the unreal_gold.zip file (I did that, checked for viruses, ran it, everything is good) and It automatically pulls the ISO files from the Internet Archive and installs them on your computer without having to go through all the trouble of installing an imaginary drive etc.
The same goes for groundbreaking online multiplayer games Unreal tournament.
Kudos to Epic for the cool approach, because while it shouldn’t be unusual for people to be happy to freely share a three-decade-old game that they no longer sell, it’s vanishingly rare. And Give every penny you can to support Internet Archive– it’s one of the last really good things on the internet.
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