Games @sh.itjust.works misk @sopuli.xyz 3 days ago

Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament are now free on the Internet Archive, and Epic says that's A-okay

www.pcgamer.com Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament are now free on the Internet Archive, and Epic says that's A-okay

Finally, a win for game preservation.

16 comments

There's a statue with four tits in the first game.

G g g g godlike!!!!
- It's a 512x512 resolution texture in a game from 1998 back when 480p was standard and 320p was still pretty common. It was very important that you saw those breats.
  
  I still remember it to this day
Now make UT2k4 available 🙏
Me and my friends would play UT99 on 120% speed and instagib only.

Aah, good times.

Fuck the bots Loque & Tamerlame! They would kill you before you could even react.
- UT99 with the Chaos UT mod, playing on DM-Morpheus or CTF-Facing Worlds. We had it so good back then.
- Shock rifle instagib arena. Yep. And I agree fully, two towers or whatever it was called was unplayable with those two.
- Back in like middle school or whatever it was around that time we had a portable drive (or was it just on a CD?) with an installed folder of UT99 we used to bring to school. During recess we'd go and copy paste it to the PCs in the computer room and play little LAN tournaments until a teacher would find us and chase us out. Instagib only or course, and I think we also played 120% speed.
  
  Good times indeed.
Honestly, I didn't expect that Epic would be okay with this.

It's nice to see, and bluntly, after a game has gone through all the different stages of buying and owning, why not make it free? Makes it that much easier for nostalgia nerds to have awesome LAN parties.

I don't think this makes up for the long list of consumer hostile things that Epic has done, but it doesn't hurt.

The next thing I'd like to see is to have games open sourced when stuff like this happens and the game is well into obsolescence. At least someone can pick up the mantle that studios don't want to have anything to do with, when it comes to making the game compatible with newer operating systems, or alternative operating systems (like Linux, though I think UT supported Linux), or so that it can be built for new architectures like Apple's new arm based silicon.

There's no profit in the game anymore, so just let people have it so they can fix what you don't care about anymore.
- That source code is available and the game is maintained on all major platforms including ARM Mac native.
  
  https://github.com/EpicGames/Signup
  
  https://github.com/JimmieKJ/unrealTournament (public mirror)
  
  https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches
  
  That's truly surprising.
  
  Thanks for sharing.
I spent hours and hours of my adolescence playing this game.

Probably this game has my personal record of played hours in a game.

I love this news ♥️
- Me too. My favorite memories come from Unreal Tournament on Dreamcast. I had this terrible, ancient LCD projector that overheated and turned off over and over again. It had to be opened, so to block the light I stuck a black sheet over it and stuck a fan in the window.
  
  We had a huge screen that honestly was probably barely visible, and we had a blast.
This is great news. Sets precedent, which is helpful in legal cases, even if it was voluntary.
Roger that!

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