Fans rescued Unreal Tournament 2004 and released it for free

Enthusiasts from the OldUnreal community have accomplished the impossible: they not only brought the iconic shooter Unreal Tournament 2004 back to life, but also made it available to everyone absolutely free of charge. The project was a response to Epic Games, which several years ago removed all Unreal games from digital stores and shut down the official servers, effectively consigning its own legacy to oblivion.

The development team has released a large-scale patch that fixes numerous legacy bugs and adds important modern settings. The main advantage of the update is the ability to run the classic action game on current versions of Windows and Linux operating systems, which previously presented significant technical difficulties. Furthermore, an installer with the game image has been released on the OldUnreal website, allowing users to download it free of charge. The open-source patch itself is, as usual, hosted on GitHub.

Remarkably, Epic Games not only does not oppose this initiative, but has actually given its blessing to the project to preserve the classic series. Perhaps the company understands the value of the community's loyalty, which continues to support games forgotten by the official publisher. It's worth noting that the last numbered installment in the franchise, Unreal Tournament 3, was released in the fall of 2007, and the series has been in a deep hiatus since then.