Unreal | Code Like It's 198x

Unreal begins in a prison cell. The player is a convict whose transport ship, the Vortex Rikers, has crashed on an unknown planet, and who wakes up unarmed among the bodies of the other prisoners. The first level is a walk through the wrecked ship, past locked doors and noises in the dark. Then a door opens onto daylight, waterfalls and a valley, and, as Edge put it in its review, “all thoughts of its rivals have been banished.”

That reveal was what people remembered. Epic MegaGames and its Canadian partner Digital Extremes had worked on the game for about four years, long enough that Computer + Video Games recalled it being first shown “around the same time as original Quake”. When it came out in May 1998 the reviews spent most of their space on how it looked. Computer Gaming World’s Dan Fitzpatrick warned that “you may accidentally drown while mesmerized beneath the beautifully undulating surface of a pond.”

Fast facts

Developers: Epic MegaGames, “in collaboration with Digital Extremes”, as the advertising put it.
Designers: James Schmalz of Digital Extremes and Cliff Bleszinski of Epic; Tim Sweeney wrote most of the engine.
Publisher: GT Interactive.
Released: PC, 22 May 1998 in North America; on sale in Britain by the summer of 1998 for £35 to £40.
Engine: the first Unreal Engine, which other studios were licensing before the game came out.
Setting: the planet Na Pali, home of the four-armed Nali and invaded by the reptilian Skaarj.
Multiplayer: 2 to 16 players over a network or the internet.

Making it

Sweeney later recalled that Epic started Unreal in 1994. Epic was then a shareware publisher in Maryland whose best-known games had come from other people, among them Schmalz’s Epic Pinball and Bleszinski’s Jazz Jackrabbit. When Edge previewed Unreal in January 1997 it credited the engine “mostly” to Sweeney and reported that it ran at 25 frames a second on a 133MHz Pentium without a 3D card. Three months later Schmalz, introduced by the Italian magazine Zeta as the game’s co-designer, described the plot of the prison ship crashing on a mysterious planet, and picked out “coloured, moving lights” and volumetric fog as its most notable effects. To finish the game, Sweeney said, Epic gathered its scattered team in Waterloo, Canada, for a year.

The engine was sold before the game was. By spring 1998, PC Games reported, MicroProse had licensed it for a Star Trek game and Ion Storm for a role-playing espionage game from Warren Spector, who went on to lead Deus Ex on the same engine; Spector had been “especially impressed with Unreal’s scripting language”. The Unreal Engine entry tells that story.

Playing it

Unreal is a single-player game first. Its levels run from the wrecked ship through mines, temples, castles, villages and spacecraft, and Edge thought them made “to be savoured rather than blasted through”, calling it “another small step from shoot ’em up to exploration game”. The peaceful Nali, who sometimes lead the player to secret areas, have a habit of wandering into the line of fire.

The enemies impressed reviewers most. Edge called the game’s artificial intelligence its “biggest single achievement”: a Skaarj knocked off a walkway would climb back up, and enemies ducked behind corners, dived away from projectiles and retreated when outgunned. Computer Gaming World found them as fast as the player, which made running backwards while firing “a vital Unreal skill”.

The player starts with a dispersion pistol that recharges itself and can be powered up. Every weapon has a second way of firing: the Eightball launcher also throws grenades, the flak cannon fires either a spray of shrapnel or a single explosive shell, and the Razorjack throws spinning blades. Edge counted “nearly 20 offensive options” among nine weapons. Not everyone liked them. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer complained that the guns “don’t go Bang — they whimper”, and that it was hard to tell which was the most effective.

The pictures cost a great deal of computer. Computer Gaming World listed a 166MHz Pentium and 16MB of memory as the minimum and recommended a 3Dfx Voodoo card. Computer + Video Games suggested a 300MHz Pentium II with 64MB and a Voodoo 2, and found the game “hardly playable at all” on a 200MHz machine with a 3Dfx card: “a game for enthusiasts only. Rich enthusiasts.”

Reception

Edge gave it eight out of ten. It admired the lighting, the architecture and the enemies, disliked the stiff animation and the small number of opponents on screen, and concluded that Unreal fell short of a masterpiece only because it was “just too much like” the games it beat. Computer Gaming World thought its single-player game “as good as anything I’ve seen so far, and arguably better”, but listed “ho-hum multiplayer play” among its faults. In Britain it topped PC Zone’s chart, still at number one in August 1998 “despite World Cup fever”. Later sources put its sales at 1.5 million by 2002.

Looking back in 2002, Edge wrote that it had been “the first PC title to truly utilise the atmospheric possibilities of coloured and real-time lighting”. Unreal also shipped with its own level editor. Edge singled out Epic’s “decision to give away complete level creation tools”.

What came next

Legend Entertainment made the official expansion, Return to Na Pali, reviewed in 1999. Epic’s Unreal Tournament (1999) took the multiplayer side that Unreal had neglected and made a whole game of it; Unreal Tournament 2003 (2002) and Unreal Tournament 2004 followed. Legend’s Unreal II: The Awakening, published under Infogrames’ Atari label, brought back the single-player game in 2003. Digital Extremes went on to its own games; in 2004 Edge previewed its shooter Pariah as the return of “Unreal’s creator”, with Schmalz as the studio’s founder and creative director.

Epic removed Unreal from online stores in late 2022. In November 2024 it confirmed that the game and Unreal Tournament could be downloaded free from the Internet Archive, and the OldUnreal team, which has maintained the game with Epic’s permission, published installers that fetch the original disc image and apply its updates.

Released source code

Epic has not released the source code of the 1998 game. The engine’s code went to licensees at the time; the later engine’s source has been available to registered users since 2014 under Epic’s licence (see Unreal Engine).

Sources

Edge issue 41, January 1997: Unreal preview (the engine “mostly the work of one programmer”, 25 frames a second on a P133).
“L’irreale all’attacco”, Zeta issue 25, April 1997, pp. 41–42: James Schmalz as co-designer on the plot and the coloured lights and volumetric fog; Cliff Bleszinski as co-designer and producer.
Computer Gaming World issue 158, September 1997, p. 125: Unreal advertisement, “Created by Epic Megagames, Inc. in collaboration with Digital Extremes. Published and distributed by GT Interactive”.
PC Games (US), May/June 1998, p. 32: MicroProse and Ion Storm licensing the engine before release; Spector and the scripting language.
Edge issue 60, July 1998, pp. 86–87: review, £40, eight out of ten (the crashed prison ship, the Nali, the AI, nine weapons, the editor, “just too much like”).
Computer + Video Games issue 200, July 1998, pp. 79–80: review, £34.99 (the Vortex Rikers, four years in development, hardware, deathmatch modes).
Dan Fitzpatrick, “Real Close”, Computer Gaming World issue 170, September 1998, pp. 224–225: review ($54.95, requirements, 2 to 16 players, weapons, AI, “ho-hum multiplayer”).
PC Zone issue 66, August 1998, p. 28: charts, Unreal at number one.
Computer Gaming World issue 183, October 1999: review of Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali.
Edge issue 107, February 2002, pp. 42–43: Infogrames’ Atari brand, Legend’s Unreal 2 and earlier Unreal Mission Pack, Digital Extremes, and Unreal as “the first PC title to truly utilise” coloured real-time lighting.
Hyper issue 114, April 2003, p. 52, and Computer Gaming World issue 225, April 2003, p. 106: Unreal II: The Awakening reviews.
Computer Gaming World issue 239, June 2004: Unreal Tournament 2004 review.
Edge issue 141, October 2004, p. 27: Pariah preview, James Schmalz as Digital Extremes’ founder and creative director.
Benj Edwards, “From The Past To The Future: Tim Sweeney Talks”, Gamasutra, 25 May 2009 (web, secondary; interview): Unreal begun in 1994 and finished in Waterloo. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/from-the-past-to-the-future-tim-sweeney-talks
Wikipedia, “Unreal (1998 video game)” (web, secondary): the 22 May 1998 release and sales of 1.5 million by November 2002 (citing The Globe and Mail, 12 November 2002). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_(1998_video_game)
“Classic Unreal Tournament and Unreal now easier to download free thanks to OldUnreal”, GamingOnLinux, November 2024 (web, secondary): removal from stores in 2022, Epic’s statement, OldUnreal’s installers. Wikipedia (above) records OldUnreal’s patches as made with Epic’s permission. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/11/classic-unreal-tournament-and-unreal-now-easier-to-download-free-thanks-to-oldunreal/
For Epic’s history, Unreal Tournament and the engine, see the Epic Games, Tim Sweeney and Unreal Engine entries and their sources.