Unreal is 20 Years Old

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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Can you believe that Unreal is 20 years old? Steam will have a FREE Unreal Gold Edition for a limited time starting at Noon CDT. While you may not be aware of this, HardOCP's original content was published 20 years ago as well, and the title of our page was "The Unreal Framerate Page." Our work with overclocking CPUs of the day and getting those to run as fast as the then fastest and most expensive Intel CPUs was picked up by Voodoo Extreme and Blue's News, and from then it all just snowballed. Fun times for sure. We imagine that the video below will bring back a lot of memories.

Check out the video.

There's no video I could make to truly do a game like Unreal justice, as there is just far too much, too much that makes this game as special as it is, if I were to show everything, every amazing landscape, every unique creature, every cool experience and moment that Unreal has given throughout the years, this video would be hours and hours long and go on forever. What you see here is a fraction, a glimpse, of the amazing game that this is, and I hope to show people where Unreal all began.
 
AthlonXP

AthlonXP

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Wow! Time does fly, I did not get into PC gaming until after this came out. Around the time when Half-Life/Counter Strike and UT99 came out.
 
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Deleted member 245375

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Still the best looking PC game of all time IMO, that's my story and I'm sticking to it - especially considering that I had the truly awesome Matrox G400 video card at the time Unreal was released and the part at the beginning of the game where your character exits the transport ship that crashed and makes his way outside, that walk to that cliff, seeing that drop, that waterfall in the distance, and then firing off a shot from the weapon and literally waiting 15 seconds for to reach the other side of the chasm was fucking breathtaking.

I just got a ThinkPad with a Quadro GPU and it's got a 2880x1620 IPS panel in it and I actually purchased Unreal Gold from GOG in the recent past so, I'm going to see if I can get the game working at that resolution. I know it's not "4K" (and 4K isn't even 4K really, go figure) but even so, it's some high definition stuff regardless. ;)
 
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TeleFragger

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best map I enjoyed... Faces.. FYI - my name here is due to Quake III Arena.. I would OWN.. I could see people running to a port.. knew which to go into and Tele-Frag them!!!!! WOOOOT! good ole days..
 
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erexx

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Couldn't wait to get home to play this game. Almost every penny I had went into PC hardware at the time... the rest went to rent, food and beer because you know priorities.
 
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BSmith

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My first online game. I loved playing the original Unreal Tournament. Bugs and all, it was just a blast. Managed to get #1 ranking for about 3 days. Nothing has ever come close to bringing that grin to my face,...."God like!". It was a great mix of action and strategy with a lot of fun weapons.

Bought it at Best Buy one day, on a lark. It was on sale. Played the offline game and got hooked. Went online (found a server I could get a 10ms ping to) and got completely sucked in.
 
Shmee

Shmee

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The remixed Underworld track doesn't start until about three minutes in to the video.
 
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NinjaCool

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I got my first PC back in 1996 as a kid after having used an Amiga 500, so I was there when Unreal got released and I sure enjoyed playing and completing it :)
 
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TeleFragger

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trentchau said:
So many memories and spent money trying to make Unreal look better. It actually was amazing on my Voodoo Banshee (Or I lied to myself enough that it was).

Was rocking my PII-450 for this damn game.
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oooh I always envied people like you... with the voodoo banshee cards!!!! I think I had a matrox millennium on a Pentium pro machine with 4mb ram!!!!
 
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PenGunn

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I had my PPro up then. It with the various range register tweaks was just amazing for Quake back then. I can't remember if that helped Unreal but I sure did have fun with that rather wonderful game.
 
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Nukester

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I loved the original game. Hated when they went multi-player centric. Ruined the game.
 
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TeleFragger

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PenGunn said:
I had my PPro up then. It with the various range register tweaks was just amazing for Quake back then. I can't remember if that helped Unreal but I sure did have fun with that rather wonderful game.
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my buds drooled when I went from 512k cache to 1mb cach in my PPro!!!! LOL
 
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Stoly

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I recall playing it at super duper ultra HD on a Matrox M3d back in the day. I tried playing it again a couple of years ago, but it made me sick in no time.
Time to get some dramamine...
 
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evolucion8

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When I first played that game, was on a laptop as my desktop was too old, it had a Pentium III Tualatin core ticking at 1.13GHz with 512KB cache, 512MB of RAM, Windows XP and a Radeon M6 aka Radeon 7000. I was able to max it at its high resolution display of 1024x768.
 
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defaultluser

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I must be one of the only people who think the game is overrated?

Quakeworld had much slicker multiplayer, which is why it spawned Team Fortress. Or if you needed newer graphics, Quake II had the same netcode with similar effects to Unreral.

And Half-Lie had a better single-player story line than either Quake or Unreal.

And it shipped with mostly just a Glide or software renderer, which in 1998 was a complete fail. It took them months to add more modern rendering paths, and it's still buggy in it's final release.

EPIC didn't put out a decent shooter until Unreal Tournament. Their first mostly bug-free game.
 
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STEvil

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20 years and still most games cant support 128 players like unreal could..
 
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Deleted member 245375

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defaultluser said:
I must be one of the only people who think the game is overrated?
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Unreal Tournament was overrated, in my opinion, absolutely, but Unreal - the one player experience game that started it and spawned the UT side of the game - is awesome to this day, that's what most of us remember: that experience playing the one player game itself. I couldn't care less about the multiplayer - id Software basically invented that and Quake and all the related games did it better IMO, so I was a diehard Q1/2/3 player for many years and never gave a fuck about UT at all.

Unreal, man, there's never really been anything like that one. The coder that created the original Reaper bot for Quake was hired by Epic to write the bot code for the "bad guys" in Unreal and it was freakin' scary - and I mean that literally - to see how "smart" those things where when you faced off with the Skaarj warriors. They learned from their mistakes as you'd expect but they also learned from your tactics and would even sacrifice themselves just to provide a way for other Skaarj warriors to then swarm on you to stop you.

Scary, and breathtakingly gorgeous artwork and textures too, it was unparalleled in those respects, it still is.
 
Criticalhitkoala

Criticalhitkoala

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defaultluser said:
I must be one of the only people who think the game is overrated?

Quakeworld had much slicker multiplayer, which is why it spawned Team Fortress. Or if you needed newer graphics, Quake II had the same netcode with similar effects to Unreral.

And Half-Lie had a better single-player story line than either Quake or Unreal.

And it shipped with mostly just a Glide or software renderer, which in 1998 was a complete fail. It took them months to add more modern rendering paths, and it's still buggy in it's final release.

EPIC didn't put out a decent shooter until Unreal Tournament. Their first mostly bug-free game.
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Probably not the only person, but I don't agree with you in your thoughts.
 
Criticalhitkoala

Criticalhitkoala

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Tiberian said:
Unreal Tournament was overrated, in my opinion, absolutely, but Unreal - the one player experience game that started it and spawned the UT side of the game - is awesome to this day, that's what most of us remember: that experience playing the one player game itself. I couldn't care less about the multiplayer - id Software basically invented that and Quake and all the related games did it better IMO, so I was a diehard Q1/2/3 player for many years and never gave a fuck about UT at all.

Unreal, man, there's never really been anything like that one. The coder that created the original Reaper bot for Quake was hired by Epic to write the bot code for the "bad guys" in Unreal and it was freakin' scary - and I mean that literally - to see how "smart" those things where when you faced off with the Skaarj warriors. They learned from their mistakes as you'd expect but they also learned from your tactics and would even sacrifice themselves just to provide a way for other Skaarj warriors to then swarm on you to stop you.

Scary, and breathtakingly gorgeous artwork and textures too, it was unparalleled in those respects, it still is.
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gotta extremely disagree with you here man. UT's mod system, along with coming out the same time the Matrix did made Q3A feel like OLD news. UT was revolutionary for MP in my opinion. I think a lot of what it did right is consistent in some of the Multi player we see today (along with some stuff in Q3, Half Life DM, Counter Strike, and Tribes).
 
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spintroniX

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damn... I was balls deep in quake by the time I had a PC capable of playing these games. Played some Unreal at my buddy's house, but never got seriously into it. I'll be picking up the Gold edition on Steam for sure.

Love the music, love the era, love the genre.
 
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TeleFragger

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Tiberian said:
Unreal, man, there's never really been anything like that one. The coder that created the original Reaper bot for Quake was hired by Epic to write the bot code for the "bad guys" in Unreal and it was freakin' scary - and I mean that literally - to see how "smart" those things where when you faced off with the Skaarj warriors. They learned from their mistakes as you'd expect but they also learned from your tactics and would even sacrifice themselves just to provide a way for other Skaarj warriors to then swarm on you to stop you.
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the only AI, in my opinion, that has done better was rainbow six vegas 2... close doors behind you and you hear the AI open the doors and they also surround you, etc...

Xrave said:
the flak cannon was my shit
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Same... and the razor gun.. forget the name but could bounce those razors off the ground... hah
 
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