Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament are both free on the Internet Archive, with Epic's blessing

For veteran PC gamers, the word 'Unreal' means a lot more than that engine every modern game developer seems to be using. Unreal (1998) and the multiplayer-focused Unreal Tournament (1999) are iconic first-person shooters that helped establish the genre as the gaming world transitioned to full-3D environments, characters, and animation.

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And now, both games are freely accessible and available to download via the Internet Archive, with Epic Games' blessing. In a statement provided to PC Game, the company wrote, "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."

In 1999 and 2000, the biggest PC shooters were undoubtedly Quake and Unreal, with Unreal Tournament in particular helping usher in the age of readily accessible, fast-paced online multiplayer shooters. Both titles were visual showcases for in-game visuals, running on the first version of the 'Unreal Engine.'

Getting these games to run on modern hardware and operating systems isn't as easy as downloading the ISO files from Archive.org. Instead, the best way to install them would be to head to the following OldUnreal pages, which include installers that download and extract the ISO files from Archive.org and make both games compatible with modern Windows machines.

Unreal Gold

Unreal Tournament

Both Unreal and Unreal Tournament were designed for systems with 640x480 resolution displays, which doesn't look quite as impressive in 2024 after being stretched to fit a 4K screen. That said, having access to these iconic shooters, preserved on the Internet Archive, is excellent news.