20th Anniversary: Unreal by Epic MegaGames

Released on May 22nd 1998.


Interesting facts about Unreal
-According to How Long to Beat’s website the average play through takes about 11 hours to complete.
-According to GameRankings.com, Unreal currently holds an overall rank of #801, and #163 for the PC.
-During early development of the engine, Intel invited Epic (at the time they were going by the name Epic MegaGames) to demonstrate Unreal. Afterwards Intel would send Epic the chip with their new MMX cpu infrastructure. Which would help Unreal be one of the first games released to utilize this new technology.
-At one point during development, Epic was working on a version to be run on the N64DD system that was never released. Epic did state that they probably could get it to run on the base N64 system, but the assets would be scaled down tremendously, however, they ended up discontinuing that idea as well.
-Unreal came bundled with two modification programs, UnrealScript and UnrealEd. UnrealScript would allow modders to write their own scripts to run in the game, while UnrealEd would allow modders to create or modify new maps as well as maps that Epic developed for the game.
-There is still a large community supporting Unreal. Epic would stop official support in July 2000, but with Epic’s permission, the community was given the source code to continue support in 2008. A patch was released in 2012 to help bring Unreal to newer OS’s with DirectX 9 support.
-Unreal would ultimately sell more than 1.5 million units, as well as be nominated for two awards from different publications.

Unreal on Wikipedia.

NewGame+ Content:
Gameplay by deathcowz

OST by MaxOfS2D (alternative channel)

You can view more video game anniversaries by heading over to our “Entries of the Den” page!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *