Encyclopedia > Unreal
Unreal
Epic Games published the first-person shooter Unreal on Memorial Day 1998, having been in development by Epic and Digital Extremes for about three years.
It was seen as a major competitor to id Software's Quake series, but its technology was a little superior to the then published Quake 1 and 2.
Since it was basically as scriptable and customizable as Quake and featured its own scripting language UnrealScript, it soon had a large community on the internet which added new modifications to it to change or enhance game play.
In its primary version (just labeled "Unreal"), the focus lay on the single player aspect. Epic Games' 1999 followup title Unreal Tournament, though, had its focus on Multiplayer only and competed against Id's Quake III Arena.
Since then, many other companies in the business have licensed the underlying "Unreal Engine" to speed up development by not building their own game engine from scratch, including e.g. the Star Trek 3rd person adventure Deep Space Nine: The Fallen or Ion Storm's Deus Ex. Newer versions of the engine are being used for PC games such as Running with Scissors' Postal 2, 3D Realms' Duke Nukem Forever, and Ion Storm's Deus Ex 2.
Unreal's sequel, Unreal II: The Awakening, has gone gold and is due for release in early February, 2003. Unreal Tournament 2003 has gone gold and was released late September, 2002. It has a Linux port on the third CD, which works reasonably well.
External Links There are two Wiki sites documenting the Unreal engine:
- The official Unreal Developer Network at http://udn.epicgames.com (with the imminent release of UT2003, UDN is now mostly open to the public - any information that relates to UT2003 can be viewed)
- One created by the online community at http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/
The official web site is:
Popular Unreal community web sites include:
Popular Unreal modding web sites include:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
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