It’s Out There

On October 29, the folks at OldUnreal posted on their Discord that they’d obtained permission to link to full versions Unreal and Unreal Tournament on their website.

They followed up on November 13 with a post adding that they’d obtained permission to link to the Unreal Gold disc from Totally Unreal. That way you can get the Return to Na Pali expansion.

GamingOnLinux reached out to Epic Games and a spokesperson confirmed that everyone is allowed to link to the versions hosted on the Internet Archive:

We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org and people are free to independently link to and play these versions.

For posterity, here are the Internet Archive links that have been vetted and will be used by the OldUnreal installers:

• Unreal, released May 22, 1998
• Unreal Gold, released January 21, 2000
• Unreal Tournament: Game Of The Year Edition - Disc 1, released October 27, 2000

What About Disc 2?

We had worried about Disc 2 of Unreal Tournament and have reached out to several parties for clarification if the above links are the only official, approved ones. Given the statement that Epic Games has made, and the above uploads were done by random individuals that does not appear to be the case. We want to highlight the statement Epic Games has already made. Contrary to what some folks might say in the chats, there isn’t any specific upload that you have to use. Feel free to download redump quality dumps. They effectively do not care.

For those wondering, Disc 2 contains the modification ChaosUT, some user maps and a copy of WONSwap:

• Unreal Tournament: Game Of The Year Edition - Bonus Disc

Checksums

We have generated SHA-256 checksums for these URLs, so you can verify they will not have been tampered with in the future:

Unreal.iso:

155dc73d515ec8c7982d11389bb22c95f115bddd4fb73598ef551aa296c97fbc

UNREAL_GOLD.ISO:

7e360d0cc9e5533f38859819fd3cbfea7c475ecd428f9f433b5f8e1d5742cbca

UT_GOTY_CD1.iso:

e184984ca88f001c5ddd52035d76cd64e266e26c74975161b5ed72366c74704f

UT_GOTY_CD2.iso:

d95d8ee1cf95562ee023fd54035ec8813d4275f63d1847423220986edc8d00d8  

What’s Next?

frag-net.com’s staff says:
GO PLAY SOME UNREAL, OR UNREAL TOURNAMENT!

The community needs more players to survive, that’s why the games have been made free.

Seriously go play it, and go make some maps and mutators while you’re at it!

Overall, the release has been incredible news, and many thanks go out to Epic Games and the people at OldUnreal who were able to negotiate this deal. Thanks to Dark1 for helping us with this story.

OldUnreal is going to provide installers for Linux and MacOS over the coming days/weeks as well. Soon it will be easier than ever to play these fine classics.

We’ll be updating our site to incorporate all this new info over the coming days.

Watch out for more files coming soon, too!