#as someone born in the 90s i of course was very into the 3d pinball game on the computer

[zombiescantfly]

Words About Games: Unreal (Epic Megagames, 1998)

Unreal Tournament 2004 is my favorite videogame ever.  It's always a close match between it and the first Unreal Tournament, but 2k4 always manages to win out, if just barely.  However, I am of the firm, unyielding belief that UT2004, when played with both the ‘No Adrenaline’ and ‘UT Classic’ mutators, is far and away the best multiplayer fps experience anyone could ever ask for.  We'll get into that a bit later, because it's time for a bit of an explanation.

Unreal Tournament 2004 turns 15 this year, and I wanted to do something special to celebrate the release of a game I have such an unreasonably high appreciation for.  Up until the day of its official release 15 years ago, I'm going to be putting out one of my infrequent essays on the games in the series I have experience with, starting now with 1998’s Unreal.  I'll warn you, this one gets a bit rambly, but if you reach the end and still want more, take a look at the cooperative non-coop playthrough I did with a friend, where we each played a singleplayer campaign while discussing our experiences and thoughts on all aspects of the game.

But first, a little background.

I was born in 1992.  Wolfenstein 3D, the game commonly attributed as the progenitor of the entire FPS genre (yes I know about Maze and Battlezone and all the various first-person dungeon crawlers) was released three months later.  This makes me just barely older than the modern first -person shooter.  

My dad has worked in the business end of the tech industry since the 80s.  As a result, he was always very close to the then-rising PC gaming scene, and even dabbled in game dev for a few years.  His position in various companies made him a very early adopter of the ‘home pc,’ something still rare up until like the mid 90s, seriously.  He had free reign to take old hardware his workplace was replacing or to buy it for cheap, and by the time I was old enough to start forming memories that actually stuck around, there were two computers in the house.  

In 1994, id Software released Doom 2, and my dad bought a copy.  Thus began the long tradition of young me standing behind his chair to watch whatever he was playing, starting with Doom 2 LAN deathmatch with my older brother, progressing to his playthrough of Quake 1 and 2, and the first stop in this extended flashback, Quake 2’s online deathmatch.

Young me knew what a marvel online deathmatch was, because my dad told me.  It's also just kind of a hard concept for a 5 year old to grasp, especially back then before the internet was in the public consciousness.  Nowadays I doubt there's any lack of understanding, and that's cool.  

(And yes, I know Q1 had online play but I never managed to catch any of it.  Both my dad and brother liked its singleplayer more.)

So where does Unreal come in?  Actually, not until about 2009.  Bear with me.

In 2000, when I was 8 years old, my dad and brother had gone to spend the day at a local tech trade show.  This was a common enough occurrence since we lived less than an hour away from Philly and that attracted a lot of businessy types.  They'd usually come back with a new game or two, and I'd have something new to watch over one of their shoulders.

That day, my brother brought this home.

And said to me, “Hey, you should try this one out.  It's from Epic.”

Or at least something to that effect.

Now, at this point in my life, I wasn't as avid a videogame connoisseur.  The first game I ever truly felt grab me was Starcraft, which I played way more than I probably should have.  But also at that time was a growing collection of titles from Epic Megagames.  Epic Pinball is one of the first things I remember playing by myself, followed by Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and One Must Fall: 2097.

So I'd been with Epic for a while at that point.

So, Unreal Tournament.  Spoilers for the next post, but I loved it, and I still love it.  It capped off my experiences with shooters from the mid to late 90s with the first taste I was allowed myself, no longer stolen from over a shoulder while hoping my mother wouldn't choose then to come down the stairs and yell at me for watching and at my dad for letting me.  It gave me a love for arena shooters, for the chunky, harshly and gaudily lit 3d graphics, for imaginative weapons, for tightly designed maps, and for a special sort of way to deliver a story buried in map and item descriptions…

But I'd never played Unreal.

Once, at a thrift store, I found a big-box copy of Unreal Gold, still in the shrink wrap, for five bucks.  “Oh, I think your dad has that one,” my mother said, turning me away from it.

He did not.

So in 2009, I finally bought Unreal for myself off Steam and promptly returned to the chunky 3d I had probably just been seeing a day prior because I put UT99 on my school laptop.  

Enough digressions, let's finally move into it.

Unreal is a strange game, and more than a little unlike its contemporaries.  See, from 1993 to 1998, shooters were kind of a one-note experience.  You, bad guys, big maps, many guns.  From Doom to Quake to Heretic to Blood to Rise of the Triad to Shadow Warrior to Duke Nukem to Dark Forces to anything else you could find in a magazine for mail-order, the shooter was a pretty standard experience.  Sure, this or that game had this or that thing that set it apart, some were more advanced than others for the time, but the general idea never really wavered:  Click on men from point A to B until you find all the keys and reach the exit.

That gameplay loop made the genre successful, and it's not exactly different now.  Keys could be anything, of course.  They were literal keys, sometimes they were gas for a generator, now they're mostly cutscene triggers, but the point is that you must locate them to progress.  Along the way, there wasn't much other than bloody slaughter to distract you, and that was fine.

It was fine.  For those 5 years.

Then, in 1998, a very special sort of game came out that changed the way not just shooters but videogames in general were presented.  A game that made expectations higher, products examined more critically.  I'm talking, of course, about Half-Life.

On November 19, 1998, Half-Life released and literally changed the course of game development.  It offered players a brilliantly constructed narrative delivered naturally by characters speaking in the moment rather than the then-common blocks of text before or after a level.  The setting, the Black Mesa research facility, was a meticulously planned space made to feel like a real location and not a jumble of corridors whose first concerns were how many monsters could fit in them.  Structured plot points replaced red and blue keycards, well-designed enemy encounters replaced rooms full of cannon fodder, and a new mentality replaced the old.

Which is a shame, because Unreal did something different, too.

Released earlier the same year on May 22, Unreal was the end result of a project always too ambitious for the four years it bounced around development.  Conceived first as a medieval RPG of sorts, Unreal eventually morphed into a sci-fi shooter set amid echoes of that original idea.  

In Unreal, there is no opening cutscene.  There is no opening text crawl or long train ride to prepare you.  The title screen is a looping fly-through of a location in the game made to show off various engine effects like reflective surfaces, particle emitters, real-time colored lighting, animated skyboxes, and volumetric fog.  Selecting New Game sends you to a loading screen where you quickly fade in from black, staring at the wrecked interior of . . . somewhere.  You start low on health and walled in on three sides.  As you step forward towards the only path available, a pleasant, computery voice calls out “Prisoner 849 escaping.”

You are Prisoner 849, you are on a prison ship, and it has crashed.  This is all evident within the first few seconds of the game.  As you progress through the first level, you can see half-broken displays showing the sudden path the ship took, read status logs of engines and ship components, and even get a little taste of some daily life among the prisoners and crew alike.  Yes, Unreal has text logs, but they're the good kind, used to inform the world rather than exposit at the player.  

Very quickly you learn that something else is aboard the ship.  Growls and snarls appear in the distance and screams of terror can be heard through the walls.  Every so often, the same calm robot voice calls out another number, another prisoner escaping.  This all tells us a good deal of the game’s primary theme.  You're just someone.

You are Prisoner 849.  You are not the captain of the ship, you are not the high profile super prisoner, you are not a space marine guarding the ship.  You are Prisoner 849, one of many to board the Vortex Rikers, and one of many to leave.

There are no friendly human NPCs in the game.  Two crewmembers aboard the ship live long enough for you to get close, but one bleeds out as you approach him and the other is slaughtered behind a door stuck partway open so that you can only see a mysterious pair of legs sprint away amid a shower of gore.  Shortly after, you catch a fleeting glimpse of a strange figure at the other end of a ventilation shaft, obscured by fog.

Unreal slowrolls its opening.  It's reminiscent of Quake 2’s opening level, though with no combat.  You're free to wander the small area of the ship, reading various inconsequential text logs and looking at various readouts.  Words like “unknown moon” and “sudden course alterations” pop up, telling - but not explicitly - that coming to wherever this is was unintended.

Eventually you leave, exiting through an emergency hatch somewhere on the side of the ship.  A few steps forward brings you to a somewhat common looking grass expanse, not too unheard of at the time.  You're closer to the ship’s bow, and a short walk around it and through the furrow it plowed in the ground leads to a small rise that still obscures the level until depositing you at just the right angle.

You stand close to the lip of a tall cliff overlooking a shimmering lake.  On the other side, a waterfall crashes over the cliff.  Trees dot the landscape, birds fly overhead, and small critters scurry away from you.

In truth, it looks more than a bit quaint today, but in 1998 it was without equal.  Unreal is a game that put an intense focus on its world, Na Pali.  This is a world inhabited for centuries or even millennia by the Nali, a race of four-armed pacifist aliens with a little bit of magic to their claim.  Some unknown time before you begin playing, another race known as the Skaarj arrive to exploit the planet for a resource called Tarydium, enslaving the Nali in the process.  

Here's where another game might set you up as the Big Badass Hero.  You, the lone survivor of this crash; them, the downtrodden alien race; the other them, the evil tyrants.  But Unreal never does that, because you're just someone.

Remember hearing those other prisoners escaping?  More did even before you woke up.  There's a small collection of Nali huts not far from the crash site where you can find the corpses of a few other prisoners and crewmembers from the Rikers next to some healing pickups - the Nali tried to care for them.  Small bits of visual storytelling like that appear all throughout the game coupled with its smart use of text logs, and it starts strong and stays strong.  A quick swim through a lake infested with carnivorous fish can lead you to a small secret where two dead escapees can be found next to a half-eaten fish.  Further in, a dead human sits in a corner of a room, a dead Nali in the center, a flak cannon pickup on top of the latter showing their frantic last stand as the Nali abandons its pacifistic ways to protect its companion.  Much later, you’re in a Skaarj warehouse where you can see stacks of boxes bearing the same logo from the Vortex Rikers - as you’ve been doing your thing, the Skaarj have gone back and started looting the ship.  

Unreal is a game where things have been happening before you the player show up, and continue to happen while you the player are playing.  The plot does not start with you and it does not wait for you.  You’re just someone who’s been thrown into this whole situation as it unfolds, from a centuries-old conflict on Na Pali itself to the more immediate conflict of the crashed Vortex Rikers and what happened to its crew.  Around almost every corner is another story just like yours, and the fact that we’re playing Prisoner 849 and not Prisoner 521 or Ensign Burt Masterson or whoever else feels like a roll of the dice.  

Half-Life gets a lot of praise for finally putting the player behind just a regular guy.  Gordon Freeman has been made to become something of videogaming’s first everyman in the way that John McClane of Die Hard ushered in the everyman action hero.  But honestly, Half-Life wouldn’t happen without Gordon.  A scientist tells you right away that they’ve been waiting for you so they could start the test.  Without Gordon Freeman, the plot would never have progressed, and that makes it distinct from Unreal.  Half-Life’s various expansions actually do this better; Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Decay all put you in control of someone who is distinctly more Just Someone than Gordon Freeman.

But Unreal, man, Unreal just does it so well.  Occupied Na Pali is a world that does not care about you as a singular entity.  The Skaarj don’t turn and attack you because you’re The Player On A Mission, they attack you because you’re some dumb human who goes places they’re not supposed to and shoots all their friends (yes, Skaarj have friends, read the text logs).  Hell, your mission isn’t even anything particularly grand!  From the beginning, nobody tells you to do anything, you just wander out of the ship and start trying to find a way to leave.  Obviously from a game standpoint, there’s always going to be a level start and a level end, and you will go towards the end because it’s a videogame, but in the context of that game, the story is “just find a way out.”

There is a thread you pick up on early, though it might be a bit strange and requires some minor explaining here real quick:  in Unreal, you have the option when starting a new game to choose your player model.  You can see yourself a few times throughout the game - Unreal has reflective surfaces in a few spots - so it’s not totally useless.  By default, Prisoner 849 is a woman.  Canonically, Prisoner 849 is a woman.  

Early on, past the first level, you enter an ancient Nali temple, ruined and defaced by the Skaarj over the years, but not without its still-devout followers.  It’s here that you get the first hints of what seems like it might be a story more appropriate for a 90s shooter.  You see a carving on a wall that talks about “the Princess from the Stars” coming to deliver retribution to “the Demons from the Sky.”  Now, if you’ve changed your player model to male, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  But obviously the intent is to key you the player into the mentality that “oh, I’m some prophesied Chosen One, right?”  Yes and no.  We'll get back to it.

See, about a third of the way into the game you come across another crashed human ship, the ISV Kran.  The Kran, gameplay-wise, is a mixed bag of levels ranging from good to meh, the worst of it stemming from symmetrical layouts and a lack of texture variety.  But in the narrative as it unfolds, the Kran is very important.  

So far, you've passed through a dozen unique and varied environments ranging from the cliffs at the start to the ancient temple, to a Tarydium mine near a small village, a high-tech processing plant nearby, and even an old coliseum or sports arena converted by the Skaarj into a torture chamber.  The Kran is your first look at anything human-built since leaving the Rikers.

I'm not going to go through the game bit by bit, but the leadup to the Kran is important.  Throughout that first third of the game, you find escaped crew and prisoners from the Vortex Rikers fairly frequently.  The events of the game are happening without you, and things aren't going well.  

Once inside the Kran, things change a little.  Amid the text logs of status readouts and final words before the Skaarj broke in, there's a tiny narrative being constructed about a crewmember by the name of Kira.  Kira had managed to do much of what you have - she's armed herself and set off in search of a way off Na Pali with a small group of other crew, some of who you find, once again already dead.  One of Unreal’s longest maps comes in around this point, and Kira is a large focus.  She was captured, made contact with a group of Nali also held prisoner in the temple (lots of temples in Unreal, the Nali are very religious), mounted her escape, and had to leave her last remaining crewmember behind, his final log suggesting she headed for something she heard was held in the nearby belltower…

This small aside is a brilliant piece of the game, it really is.  When I said there was another game or another story behind every corner, I meant it.  Kira’s journey from the Kran to Bluff Eversmoking is a full story on its own, and it lends some interesting insight towards a lot of the various prophecies and Nali beliefs you've run into along the way.  From the Kran to the Bluff, you find more mentions of the Messiah, of the Sky Princess.  You, right?  Right?

Or was it Kira?  

Kira followed the same path you did.  Less of it, sure, but she fought the Skaarj infesting sacred Nali temples.  She, an alien warrior, cleansed their holy places of demons who had enslaved them.  A small group of Nali risked their own lives to break her out when she was captured, based only on their horror that she would be executed.  

This is why keeping 849 as the default lady playermodel is important.  The text logs were written with that in mind in order to muddle things.  Are you the Messiah?  Is Kira?  Presumably both of you just want to go home, and maybe falling into a vaguely defined prophecy with incredibly generous qualifications (not Nali or Skaarj, girl, can kill Skaarj) was just an accident.

It certainly seems that way, because when you finally find Kira, she's dead.  Your hopes of finding another living human, the Nali’s hopes in an alien warrior, lie dead on the ground with an empty pistol beside her.  

Unreal, and Na Pali within it, does not care about Prisoner 849.  The story does not revolve around you nor does it even stop to make room for you.  Any one of those human bodies you pass throughout the entire game was another escapee.  Between the Vortex Rikers and the Kran, you follow a trail of bodies almost up until the end of the game.  Except for a very small stretch at the end, someone has beaten you to where you are.  But you go further.  You encounter things no human has.  You escape Na Pali.

Eventually.

If it sounds like I'm taking Unreal a bit too seriously, it's because I most likely am.  I admit that.  But Unreal just creates such a unique atmosphere among games that I can't help it.  Videogames are inherently power fantasies, and most facilitate this by making you play as someone obviously powerful.  BJ Blazinsky.  Doomguy.  Lo Wang.  Duke Nukem.  A jedi.  Even in Call of Duty, where you often just play as some grunt, you get to be the special grunt who sees all the coolest stuff first.  And yes, again, even Half-Life doesn't start without you.  Gordon becomes mythologized even in the first game, to say nothing of Half-Life 2.  In Unreal, there's nobody to put you on a pedestal.  Na Pali has its own problems and you're just plopped down in the middle of them while trying to solve your own.  It isn't your fault that they intersect.

So it shouldn't be that big of a surprise that one of my other favorite games ever is another hero-by-random-circumstance romp through an uncaring world, Dark Souls.  If you like the narrative themes Dark Souls has going on, you'll like Unreal, end of story.

Wait, no, not end of story, because all I did was wax philosophical about the theme for like 8 pages.  I gotta talk about design now, ‘cause hot damn does my love of Unreal not stop with flowery prose.

The Skaarj are the primary antagonistic force in the game, but they're some kind of powerful empire with other races on their payroll.  After escaping the Vortex Rikers, gaping in awe at the waterfall, and spending some time chasing harmless wildlife around the field, the first actual enemy you fight is a Brute.  

Brutes are big lumps of meat with two rocket pistols and a permanent scowl.  They move slow, they turn slow, and they fire slow.  The first one you fight is really close to the exit of an indoor area.  What Epic have done here is create an excellent enemy encounter.

Nothing in Unreal has hitscan weapons.  Ignore Legend Entertainment’s Return to Na Pali, I'm gonna.  That means that everything coming your way can be dodged.  Two rocket pistols sounds scary, but you're in an open area and you have the ability to strafe.  If you're somehow not comfortable doing that while shooting, that's why the Brute’s so big, he's hard to miss.  

From there, you get exposed to the tentacle and the Razorfly.  The Tentacle is essentially a stationary, ceiling-mounted autoturret that fires a single projectile at you every half second or so, and the Razorfly is a big bug that hits you with melee attacks.  Neither are particularly challenging, but all three so far get you ready for your first encounter with a Skaarj.

You're in a small facility and have just shut off a force field.  Coming back through the hallway, bars suddenly slam out from the wall, blocking your progress.  The music fades out.  And one by one, the lights turn off until you're sitting in pure darkness.  You get a few seconds to sweat before the music kicks back in, the wall beside you slides open, flashing red emergency lights appear, and a large shape leaps out at you.

The first encounter with a Skaarj is cramped and claustrophobic, and intended to have you miss a lot of its capabilities.  It runs around, does a forward leaping melee attack, and can shoot little bolts of energy at you.  At the time, you only have two weapons: the Automag, a hitscan pistol with a decent fire rate, and the Dispersion Pistol, a projectile energy weapon you can charge up that acts in the same capacity as Doom’s fist or Quake’s axe as a holdout weapon.  You'll most likely take out the Skaarj with the Automag because there isn't a way to run out of ammo with it unless you try, so you most likely won't see how this type of enemy reacts to projectiles.

Because, see, Unreal has very smart AI, and the people who made these enemies took great advantage of that fact.  The Brutes and Razorflies of the level so far are pretty simple cannon fodder type stuff, they amble around and attack towards you.  Once you're away from that first encounter, the Skaarj enemies have a few tricks.

A Skaarj will try to circlestrafe you.  If you're using a projectile weapon, a Skaarj will dodge your attacks with a pretty damn high success rate (deviously, the very next weapon you get after the Automag is the Tarydium Stinger, a projectile-based minigun, and you start seeing Skaarj commonly around the same time).  If a Skaarj is getting near death and has allies close by, it'll try to run away towards them.  Sometimes a Skaarj will fake its death to try to catch you by surprise.  It won't ever get back up while you're looking or within a certain range, and you can take the time to see if flies start buzzing around the supposed corpse or just gib it to make sure.  A Skaarj will intuitively use cover, as well, thanks to a dead-simple pathfinding mechanism inside the level editor.

A Skaarj is a really cool enemy today, let alone in 1998, half a year before everyone lost their shit over Half-Life’s stilted Marine encounters.

Unreal keeps a pretty steady flow of enemy varieties coming your way, as well.  Various types of Skaarj show up, often with ranks padded out by the Krall, another race they employ or enslave, and they have plenty of variety among them as well.  

But Na Pali isn't just a collection of levels stuffed full of bad guys to click on.  Most levels actually don't have all that many enemies to them, instead relying on strong encounter design over sheer overwhelming odds.  . . . Most.

No, Na Pali is a world, and Unreal wants you to believe that.  The game bounces you between open outdoor areas and various structures at a healthy pace, and it always manages to give it all a fresh coat of paint.  Harmless critters hop around or soar high above, schools of fish scatter when you explore a lake, beasts of burden grumble at you as you charge past their pens, flak cannon in hand.  And better yet, enemies aren't often just waiting around for you to show up.  They have things to do or time to waste, and may very well be doing that when you come across them.  In areas controlled by the Skaarj, you can often see them tapping away at computers or just staring out a window before you alert them, and Krall mercenaries are fond of drinking or playing dice.  Brutes amble around on patrol patterns, stopping every now and then to scratch themselves.  The more feral Slith enemies found near water tend to just be swimming around until they're alerted.

These tiny details make Na Pali feel like a place, and the levels you play through are no different.  From the wrecked Vortex Rikers to the various Nali temples to the Kran and even up to the final levels set on the Skaarj mothership, the levels make room for details like bedrooms, kitchens, and even bathrooms in a way that shooters just sort of didn't usually do at that point.  Sure, you'd have a bathroom in another game every so often, but it was usually there for a gag or some sort of reference.  Unreal makes a concentrated effort to really sell you on these levels, and it works.  There's so much variety in the maps that not a lot has a chance to get boring, though sometimes, as I mentioned before, things can get a bit muddy.  The map Terraniux and the middle levels of the Kran are a bit less navigationally-friendly than they could have been, but there's nothing as egregious as the later levels of Doom or any of the other maps from various games that are mazes first and gameplay sections second.  There are no out-of-place platforming sections or agonizing breaks for switch puzzles.  There's just a world as you might find it in real life.

Another strength of Unreal’s level design is that sometimes it just lets you take a break.  You might go minutes without seeing an enemy, leaving you free to explore your surroundings.  There's even a level that has an entire segment dedicated to calmly floating down a river on a small boat, with no combat at all.  It comes after a challenging combat section and acts as a nice little breather with great visuals and fantastic music.

Oh man, Unreal’s music.  Never before or again have I heard a more distinct soundtrack in a game.  Unreal has its fair share of late-90s electronic tracks, but the majority of its music is a very chill mix of unusual instruments.  I know next to nothing about music, so let me just drop some links real quick.

Dusk Horizon

Nali Chant

War Gate

Surfacing

It's such an intriguing mix of styles, and it's all perfectly suited for the environments you hear them in.  All of the levels are colored very deliberately, and the music matches the mood that texturing and lighting creates.  Coupled with how each track has an ambient and battle section and how it seamlessly slides between them as you enter and leave combat, the levels in Unreal are all a treat to explore, and I really do urge people to look up the soundtrack because it's really just that good.

The music in this game created a precedent of quality that the series kept up easily, and is just more evidence of how committed Epic at the time were to making as immersive and vibrant a world as they could.  It's just another part of a beautifully crafted experience that created a game so unlike any other at the time or since.  

Unreal is a game that is still incredibly playable today.  On a technical level, it's the Unreal Engine so you can pop it onto anything and get it working without any real trouble.  The unofficial OldUnreal patch is easy to find, and is just a single .dll file that gets dropped in the system folder.  But that's not the only thing playable means.  Design philosophies and public reception to various systems and elements of gameplay change over time, and it renders a large number of games either too obtuse or too clunky to really get into.  But there are always games that are timeless.  Doom is still a treat because the only thing in it is shooting, there's nothing particularly experimental to have been done better over repeated iterations.  Unreal is simple in that way, too.  Its weapons are varied, unique, and famous.  Man, I didn't even get into the weapons, but I'll save that for the Unreal Tournament essay.  

My point is, Unreal did a lot, and it did it very well.  It and every other game from 1998 was overshadowed by Half-Life, unfortunately, and that became the game to beat.  Half-Life isn't the reason we never saw another Unreal in the same vein as the first, but I do think that a desire to be the next Half-Life is why the industry moved to such a narratively-focused philosophy.  There was another game three years later that also focused on sprawling outdoor areas mixed with indoor structures, but it didn't have the same lonesome exploration, living world, or details that suggested hundreds of years of mythology.  This game would go on to affect the industry just as much or even more than Half-Life, and was in fact Bungie’s Halo.  

Halo had cutscenes and voiced NPCs and all the things Half-Life made people want.  Halo is another beast, but its success was all but the final nail in the coffin for any hope Unreal had of spawning any imitators.  The era of frantic slaughterfests in key-locked mazes was over, and Unreal’s attempt at carving out a spot for contemplative exploration in living worlds was ignored.  

That style of game would come back, but not in shooter form.  Both Dark Souls and Shadow of Colossus have similar feels to them, and I'm sure there are others out there.  Other Team ICO titles, Journey, there have to be others, there are too many videogames for there not to be.  But as it stands, Unreal is all but alone, and even now, in this wave of 90s revival indie shooters, they aim more for Doom and Quake.  Even Epic would step away from Unreal’s distinctive style with its very next release.

See, Unreal was popular, but at the time, released into an audience high off of Quake 2,  those same people wanted to dive into its multiplayer.  And when it worked, it was incredible.  But it often didn't work.  Epic set to fervent work patching it to fix poor netcode and a variety of other issues, but that project turned into something far, far larger, prompting them to release an entirely new game running on an updated version of the Unreal engine.  New maps, optimized and redone versions of existing maps, remodeled and rebalanced weapons, new music, new gamemodes, everything.  

Unreal Tournament would come out a year later, setting the industry alight in its own ways.  We'll take a look at that next month, so until then, take a day or two to play through Unreal.  I played it and loved it a decade after its release, and another decade won't have changed much.  

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