Epic Games and Digital Extremes‘ shooter will run on a potato these days, so you can safely ignore the system requirements…
Epic Games may have largely abandoned Unreal in favor of Fortnite, but at least it did not lock the series that made the company famous in a digital vault. Over the past few years, Epic has allowed the Internet Archive to host its older shooters, which is why you can legally download Unreal Gold and the original Unreal Tournament from archive.org. With Epic‘s approval, Unreal Tournament 2004 has now joined that list.
This was made possible by OldUnreal, a long-running community support project dedicated to keeping Epic‘s early shooters alive. Plans to revive UT 2004 were announced late last year, outlining both the game’s release and the accompanying community fix.
The original disk image for UT 2004 lives on the Internet Archive, since OldUnreal is not authorized to host the game directly. What it can host, however, is an installer that pulls the files from that archive. Once you have downloaded the installer and obtained the full game, you then apply the OldUnreal community patch for UT 2004 from GitHub. The patch preps the game for modern operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
“Please note that this is the first public patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 in over 20 years. We have implemented numerous fixes and improvements, written a new SDL backend for Linux and macOS, and even developed a new renderer. We have also migrated the entire codebase to modern build systems. Some new bugs may have slipped in!” writes Stijn-volckaert, the UT project manager.
And yes, it actually works. We tested it by upgrading an installed GOG version (the patch supports that too), although you do have to edit an ini file in a couple of places – which is clearly documented on GitHub. Best of all, from now on, all you need to do is allow the game through your firewall and you can legally play online on servers without hunting for a serial code…
Source: PCGamer, OldUnreal, GitHub
