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That is great news! I hope we will have a few public servers left to play this online.
Instagib Face Classic Quad Jumps in 2026?

Sign me the f up!

Do they have access to the source code then?
One thing I missed from Unreal Tournament, which too few other games adopted IMHO, was the concept of mutators. Effectively server-level mods which, as the name implied, mutated the gameplay in some way.

There were silly ones like the one making your characters head larger for each kill, and those which made it just different like low gravity, and so on.

It was also relatively easy to make your own, thanks to UnrealScript.

Really wish more multiplayer games embraced this concept, it really increased replayability by changing things up.

The entire extensibility story in Unreal series has been amazing from the get go. Where QuakeC was really more of a scripting language "on the side", with UT it felt more like the entire game is written in UnrealScript, with some native bits here and there for performance. The language was interesting too, incorporating things such as first-class support for various states (you could define different implementations for a function depending on which state the object is, and derived classes could extend that).

No wonder the mutator scene in UT was crazy. My favorite mod for the original UT99 was Dr Strangelove, which modded the Redeemer gun (the one that shoots huge nuclear missiles) to allow you to ride them.

That entire realm of "Run your own game servers and do whatever you want with it" is dead. Not because of cheating either.

It's dead because if you can play on a server that lets you equip a skin you didn't pay for, that's bad for Epic's quarterly statements.

Your fun is not profitable enough. Sorry.

Battlefield 6 are trying to bring something like this back with Portal (https://portal.battlefield.com).

You can write "experiences" in TypeScript then host your own server that people can join without having to download/install a mod themselves.

Are there are any FPS shooters on the genre of UT (or even Quake3) but modern, not remasters?

I've been missing a lot the frenetic gameplay of those, used to play a lot of UT at a decent level but nowadays I only see tactical FPSs or the likes of Counter-Strike/Battlefield with a high player count.

If you want something wild and frenetic check out Chivalry 2. It's an FPSlasher
Amazing, more companies need to do this.

Separately it's a shame most modern games have removed LAN gaming.

This is great. I remember playing this for the first time at a Wizards of the Coast in the mall. They had 8 or so PCs on a LAN in the back of the store. My first true LAN party I guess.
Same, one of my very first gaming experiences. Nothing but great nostalgia!
Epic Games have been surprisingly generous with their older library. Refreshing to see.
Wow this is really exciting, especially the Mac support. UT was kinda my gateway to programming. They made it really easy to build and play your own maps.
Such a good game- very ahead of its time, great look and feel. Weird that it was allowed to wither and die.
Plaay >>

In the mystique female voice!

I bought it in steam before they removed it. So I can still install and play this game from time to time. Capture the flag is something else in this game!

I hope they fix the terrible SP campaign. The bot skill became too difficult too fast (if I remember correctly they after several stages also began to dodge your CROSSHAIR), you could not change base difficulty mid-run and the money system was punishing when you lost a match
I have a special place in my heart for UT2004 because it was one of the very few games that had an official native Linux version at the time. I think I enjoyed the fact that it was running on Linux more than I enjoyed the game itself.
I'm still sad that Epic Games axed UT4 (2014).
I honestly can't understand why Epic Games refuses to open-source Unreal 1 and UT99. They insist on licensing individual developers, instead of opening up the source so community forks can thrive. Look at the id tech community, with all the Doom and Quake forks, and all the amazing projects that spawned off of them.

The topic of "middleware" often comes up, as an excuse for them not being able to open the source. Well, just remove any third-party libraries and middleware, even EA did it with their C&C open-source releases. The C&C release did not even compile, but that did not stop the community from porting to Linux and other platforms, as well as modernizing the source and creating replacement libraries.

UT2k4 was a LAN party favorite of mine. One of the last good multiplayer FPS games before Epic lost its way.
I'm still playing ut99 GOTY with my son (yeah, I'm that old)... and nothing else matterrrrrrrrrrrr
After a particularly shitty day on the helpdesk there was nothing quite like loading up Facing Worlds, jimmying team balancing so it was 8v1 and then holding off the ensuing rush of bots for a half hour with a sniper rifle.
Used to copy the binaries to other computers in the high school journalism room and have impromptu LAN parties during school.
Surely epic will shut this down. The installer downloads a copy of the original game, well that is my reading of it.
Speaking of shooters of roughly that era, the Timesplitters Rewind fan project also just put out their first release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzWSrgQ3eMI

It's basically a modernized anthology of the three Timesplitters games that were quite popular on consoles of the PS2 era.

Wow, this is great! I wonder if there is support for ray tracing and other modern tech, but even as it is I would not mind playing this again. Been a long time. Plus, moved to Mac recently and expecting the new fangled Mac support this brings will work well.
Still can't forgive what epic did to UT4...
A standing applause for those undertaking this effort as I look forward to losing even more of my future time given how much I lost to it in the past.

Many moons ago I worked with an individual whose wife was employed in marketing by a large well known video game company involved around UT. One day he came into the office and brought a load of leftover UT swag and it was a feeding frenzy. I still have and wear my long sleeve black UT embroidered tee and as a point of fact I just wore it again last week. Looking forward to the progress on this effort as an old head UT fan still.

The most interesting part of UT2k4 to me is the software renderer. It actually worked on period hardware and many would argue it looks better. You should definitely give it a try if you've got the game on a modern machine.
I was surprised when I realized, that a game from year 2004 still had a software renderer. But I thought it was just old leftover from the first Unreal game.