Epic Games is officially cool with the Internet Archive preserving early Unreal games

Epic Games has given the green light for the Internet Archive to host installation files for Unreal and its immediate follow-up, Unreal Tournament.

According to a post within the OldUnreal Discord server (and spotted by ResetEra), the archiving website now hosts images of the two games’ original discs. Players can download those disc image files (which are here and here) individually, or use OldUnreal’s previously released Windows-only installers for the games (Unreal here, Tournament here) to automatically download and install the Archive’s files, in turn making the two arena shooters fully playable again.

Both games were pulled from sale years ago, but with Epic’s approval, get to live on as a part of video game history. The arena shooter franchise helped establish Epic as a developer, and its various sequels and spinoffs were used to showcase the game engine of the same name.

Epic and Unreal’s long, complex history

However, Epic’s overall relationship with Unreal is…complicated. Officially, the series came to an end with Unreal Tournament 3 in 2007, as Epic put its then-full attention on the Gears of War series and its MOBA Paragon. An attempt was made to revive the franchise with a new installment made in Unreal Engine 4 (and simply titled Unreal Tournament), but that was later canceled as Epic elected to focus on Fortnite, and the series was officially shelved.

In 2022, Epic officially killed the Steam servers for several older games, including the Unreal project’s alpha and Unreal Tournament 3. The latter was meant to be revived on Steam as the free-to-play Unreal Tournament 3X, but that appears to have been quietly canceled last summer.

Still, this new development provide a win for the series, along with game preservation and historians of the medium, which is always a plus.

In 2000, then-Epic programmer Brandon Reinhart wrote a post-mortem on Unreal Tournament’s development, which you can read here.