Unreal Tournament

It was meant to be an expansion for Unreal, whose multiplayer suffered from weak netcode. The add-on grew so big that in November 1998 Epic's Mark Rein suggested releasing it as a game of its own.

Epic shipped it with the same tools it had used to make it. Lead designer Cliff Bleszinski said it would never have sold nearly two million copies without its community. The fan mod ChaosUT even made it into the Game of the Year Edition.

The press praised the graphics, the maps and the gameplay, and Eurogamer handed out its first ever perfect score. PC Zone liked the bots but called the music terrible. Players leave 96% positive out of 4,477 reviews, critics give it 93 on Metacritic. By our Recommended Score it is #76 of 4,736 games.

In 2019 Epic let the fans at OldUnreal make patches for modern systems, and in late October 2024 the game was put on the Internet Archive for free.

Liked it? Try Quake III Arena, its rival, which outsold it in the US at first, and Unreal Tournament 2004, where the series added vehicles and the Onslaught mode for large battles.