May 22, 1998. Kids around the world were enjoying the peak of PlayStation or Nintendo 64 and believing that there could never be anything more realistic than Resident Evil or a better control than that of Super Mario 64 (and they weren’t wrong there). However, Epic Games was about to demonstrate how far video games could go with a shooter that changed everything at the time and gave rise to a legendary saga: Who hasn’t played a game of Unreal from time to time?
Free? It can’t be real
We may now know Epic mostly for Fortnite, but the studio has been in the video game industry since 1991, when it debuted with the forgotten ZZT. Little did they imagine that they would have franchises like Gears of War, Infinity Blade, and the Unreal Engine, the most popular of all time according to the Guinness Book of Records. It started in the garage of Tim Sweeney’s parents’ house and now controls the industry.
So much so, that they have decided to give away forever the two games that made them what they are now: Unreal and Unreal Tournament, from 1998 and 1999 respectively. And how will they ensure that they are always available? By uploading them to the Internet Archive, the site that is basically a logbook of the entire history of the Internet and offers millions of movies, series, video games, and documents that would otherwise have been lost in time.
Internet Archive holds within it the data of 835 billion web pages (yes, you can also search for your most embarrassing beginnings there), and Epic, who know well the importance of sharing to improve, as they did among studios in their time, encourages you to visit this website. There you will find the unreal_gold.zip file, which will install the ISO files on your computer and allow you to play directly without having to perform any technical tricks. And there you have it! Two of the most influential video games in history, now at an unbeatable price. And yes, if you have doubts, you should play them. Years have passed, but they are still absolutely incredible.