Unreal is a first-person shooter video game developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and published by GT Interactive (now owned by Atari) in May 1998. It was powered by an original gameplay and physics engine that now bears the game's name, one that had been in development for over three years in founder Tim Sweeney's garage before the game was released.

Since the release of Unreal, the franchise has had one sequel and two different series based on the Unreal universe. One official bonus pack, the Epic-released Fusion Map Pack, can be downloaded free of charge.

Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali was released June 1999, and added new missions to the single player campaign of Unreal. Unreal and Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali would later be bundled together as Unreal Gold. Additionally, the games were updated to run on the Unreal Tournament version of the game engine.

Plot[link]

The player takes on the part of Prisoner 849, an otherwise anonymous person, however it is possible that the Prisoner 849 is a woman named Gina, as the default character is her in the player setup. The Prisoner 849 is aboard the prison spacecraft Vortex Rikers. The ship was under way to a prison moon, but was pulled to an uncharted planet before reaching its destination. The ship crash-lands on the lip of a canyon on the planet Na Pali, home of the Nali, a primitive tribal race of four-armed humanoids. The Nali and their planet have been subjugated by the Skaarj, a race of brutish yet technologically advanced reptilian humanoids. Skaarj troops board the downed Vortex Rikers and kill the remaining survivors, save for Prisoner 849, who manages to find a weapon and escape from the ship.

The planet Na Pali is rich in "Tarydium", a mineral that is found as light blue crystals, which possesses a high energy yield, whose utility is the reason for which the Skaarj have invaded. The ship has crashed near one of the many Tarydium mines and processing facilities that the Skaarj have built. Prisoner 849 travels through the mines, meeting Nali slaves and eventually entering the ruins of Nali villages and cities, where the extent of the Nalis' suffering and exploitation are made clear.

Throughout the game the player stumbles across the remains of other humans, often with electronic journals that detail their last days and hint at the cause of their demise. Usually the tales are of desperate struggles to hide from the Skaarj or other bloodthirsty inhabitants of the planet. The player never meets another live human aside from a wounded crew member on the bridge of the prison ship who gasps and dies immediately. Prisoner 849 is likely the only human alive in the planet Na Pali throughout the game.

Prisoner 849 continues to make her way through a series of alien installations, a second crashed human spaceship, and ancient Nali temples infested with Skaarj troops and their minions, eventually arriving at the Nali Castle. Inside the castle, the prisoner locates a teleporter that leads to the Skaarj Mothership. The mothership proves to be a vast labyrinth, but Prisoner 849 manages to find the ship's reactor and destroys it, plunging the vessel into darkness. After navigating the corridors in the dark, the player arrives at the Skaarj Queen's chamber and kills her. Prisoner 849 jumps into an escape pod as the mothership disintegrates. Although the prisoner survives the Skaarj, the escape pod is left to float into space, with slim hopes of being found.

Novels[link]

Two novels titled Hard Crash and Prophet's Power were published, expanding on the premise and story first introduced in Unreal. Prophet's Power, the second book in the series, is actually a prequel to the first, Hard Crash, thus it is harder for readers to understand what happened in the story.

Expansion plot[link]

The expansion, Return to Na Pali, picks up not long after Unreal's ending; Prisoner 849 is found by a human warship, the UMS Bodega Bay. Upon learning of the prisoner's identity, the UMS (the Unified Military Services) conscripts her into service, forcing the prisoner to return to Na Pali in order to locate the downed ship UMS Prometheus. There, the prisoner is to retrieve some secret weapons research. In return, the prisoner will receive a full pardon and transportation back to Earth, though the real plan is revealed to be maintaining the secrecy of the mission by killing the prisoner immediately after the information is secured.

Upon arriving at the Prometheus, Prisoner 849 finds the secret weapons log, but soon after, she finds a working radio communicator nearby. The prisoner listened to a recently recorded and archived conversation between the Bodega Bay and a nearby space station, the UMS Starlight, exposing the military's treachery. As Prisoner 849 transmits the research log, a squad of marines beam onboard the ship, intending to eliminate the prisoner, who manages to escape into a nearby mine system.

Once again, Prisoner 849 is forced to traverse a series of alien facilities and Nali temples in an attempt to locate another way off the planet. Eventually the prisoner ends up at another Nali Castle, where a small space shuttle is stored. After fighting through Skaarj, the prisoner manages to take off in the spacecraft. However, the Bodega Bay is waiting in orbit, and launches a missile at the prisoner's ship. The prisoner outmaneuvers the missile, and leads it back on a collision course with the Bodega Bay. The large ship is disabled by the ensuing blast, and Prisoner 849 escapes into space.

Development[link]

The Unreal game engine was seen as a major rival to id Software's Id Tech 2 engine, and the Unreal game itself was considered to be technically superior to Quake II, which was out on the market at the same time (between December 1997 and May 1998). Originally, Unreal was going to be a Quake-style shooter—earlier screens showed a large status bar and centered weapons, similar to Doom and Quake.

As development progressed, various levels were cut from development. A few of these levels reappeared in the Return to Na Pali expansion pack. A number of enemies from early versions are present in the released software but with variations and improvements to their look. One monster that didn't make the cut was a dragon. One of the weapons shown in early screenshots was the "Quadshot"—a four-barreled shotgun. The model remains in-game, while there is no code for the weapon to function (several player-made mods bring the weapon back in the game). Another weapon shown was a different pistol, however this may have just been an early version of the Automag. At one point the rifle could fire three shots at once, which is wrongly stated as the alternate fire in the Unreal manual that comes with the Unreal Anthology.

Since Unreal came packaged with its own scripting language called UnrealScript, it soon developed a large community on the Internet which was able to add new mods (short for "modifications") in order to change or enhance gameplay. This feature greatly added to the overall longevity of the product and provided an incentive for new development. A map editor and overall complete modification program called UnrealEd also came with the package. Epic Games has encouraged its community to contribute to creating modifications through sponsoring big dollar contests, including one for Unreal Tournament for $150,000 in cash and prizes, and another for Unreal Tournament 2004 for one million in cash and prizes.^{[citation needed]}

Graphics[link]

Unreal is known for boosting the expectations of 3D graphics considerably. Compared to its peers in the genre, such as Quake II, Unreal brought to life not only highly-detailed indoor environments, but also easily the most impressive outdoor landscapes ever seen at the time. They improved the lighting and surrounding in the game, giving them a grittier darker look.^[1] This graphical splendor brought with it the side effect of requiring powerful hardware to run the game fast enough to play. The minimum requirements stated that a Pentium 166 MHz with 16 MB RAM and no 3D accelerator would be capable of running the game.

The Unreal engine brought a host of graphical improvements, including colored lighting. Although Unreal is not the first major release with colored lighting (see Quake II), it is the first to have a software renderer as feature rich as the hardware renderers of the time, including colored lighting and even a limited form of texture filtering referred to by programmer Tim Sweeney as an ordered "texture coordinate space" dither.^[2] Early pre-release versions of Unreal were based entirely around software rendering. SIMD technology is integral to allowing the software audio and 3D graphics engines to perform as well as they do. Unreal uses several SIMD technologies, including AMD's 3DNow! along with Intel's MMX and SSE (known as "KNI—Katmai New Instructions" within Unreal).

Unreal was one of the first games to utilize detail texturing. This type of multiple texturing enhances the surfaces of objects with a second texture that shows material detail. When the player stands within a small distance from most surfaces, the detail texture will fade in and make the surface appear much more complex (high-resolution) instead of becoming increasingly blurry.^[3] Notable surfaces with these special detail textures included computer monitors and pitted metal surfaces aboard the prison ship, and golden metal doors and stone surfaces within Nali temples. This extra texture layer was not applied to character models. The resulting simulation of material detail on game objects was intended to aid the player's suspension of disbelief. For many years after Unreal's release (and Unreal Tournament's release), detail texturing only worked well with the Glide renderer. It was, in fact, disabled in the Direct3D renderer by default (but could be re-enabled in the Unreal.ini file) due to performance and quality issues caused by the driver and present even on hardware many times more powerful than the original 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics.

Because of Unreal's long development time, the course of development occurred during the emergence and rapid progression of hardware 3D accelerators. So, along with the advanced software 3D renderer, Unreal was built to take advantage of the 3Dfx Glide API, which emerged as the dominant interface towards the end of the game's development. When Unreal was finally released, Microsoft's Direct3D API was growing almost exponentially in popularity and Epic was fairly quick to develop a renderer for their game engine. However, the Direct3D renderer, released initially to support the new Matrox G200, was less capable and slower than the Glide support, especially in the beginning when it was unstable, slow, and had many graphics quality issues.^[4] The Glide renderer's superiority can be seen in a review of the 3dfx Voodoo 5, where it outperformed every other card in Unreal Tournament (same engine as Unreal), due to its native Glide support. Even video cards which consistently defeated the Voodoo 5 5500 in other games could not win against Glide's greater efficiency.^[5] Unreal also had official OpenGL support.

Sound effects[link]

Unreal's "Galaxy" audio system is highly optimized for speed and quality, utilizing Intel's MMX extensively. It manages both music and sound effects. For sound effects it uses uncompressed waveforms in 8-bit or 16-bit monaural format. The engine is capable of playing back at all common sample rates but is set by default to 22 kHz playback to reduce CPU load on computers available at the time of release.

Galaxy supports rudimentary software-based 3D audio positioning as well as hardware 3D sound support (although this is quite buggy). In software mode, sounds are only stereo-panned. Phase shifting and band-pass filtering are used to imitate changes in position and distance. The sound system is limited to mixing and playing back a maximum of 64 channels, but the default is 16 channels because of CPU power limitations.

In hardware 3D audio mode, the engine is designed to support sound cards with hardware 3D audio mixing and positioning capabilities. At the time of release this included primarily the Aureal Vortex line of audio cards. In this mode, the sound card takes over sound placement with the game providing only positional information to the hardware. If the game uses more channels than the sound card supports, then the extra channels will be run on the game's software engine; this can cause sound consistency problems.

If the processor Unreal is running on lacks MMX support (i.e. a Pentium Pro), then the game will automatically reduce sound quality to low. Quality can be turned back up to full, but the audio engine is less efficient without MMX support. On non-MMX machines, the sound code does make some quality and speed trade-offs by limiting sound effects to having only 64 volume levels. This limitation can be heard by setting up an ambient sound effect with a high radius in an otherwise quiet area; the discrete steps between volume levels are quite audible. Epic also noted nearly a twofold speed boost with MMX code.^[6]

The sound system supports both the legacy WinMM sound system, and DirectSound. DirectSound generally achieves the lowest latency, while WinMM works on Windows 95 without DirectSound or Windows NT 4.0 machines.

Music[link]

	Unreal Main Menu Theme (Long Flight) noicon
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

While many game companies went from FM synthesis or General MIDI in the early 1990s to CD audio and pre-rendered audio, many of the Epic games used the less common system of module music, composed with a tracker, which used stored PCM sound effects sequenced together to produce music. Epic had been using this technology for other games such as Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall: 2097, which allowed relatively rich music to be stored in files usually smaller than one megabyte. Naturally, this technology allowed easy implementation of dynamic music for mood changes in Unreal. The Unreal soundtrack was written by MOD music authors Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos with a few selected tracks by Dan Gardopée and Andrew Sega. Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos were also responsible for the soundtracks for Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex, which also use the Unreal Engine; Michiel van den Bos also produced the soundtrack for Age of Wonders.

Unreal's music engine also supports CD audio tracks.

Map editing[link]

Unreal's method of creating maps differs in major ways from that of Quake. The bundled UnrealEd map editor uses the Unreal engine to render scenes exactly as they appear in-game, as opposed to external editors like Worldcraft attempting to recreate it with different methods. Whereas Quake maps are compiled from a variety of different components, Unreal maps are inherently editable on the fly. This allows anybody to edit any map that is created, including the maps included with the game.

Mac OS version[link]

The Mac version was released in Parallel with the PC version. It supported RAVE hardware acceleration as well as 3DFX's Voodoo, built-in software rendering and, later on, OpenGL rendering. RAVE acceleration support allowed the game to support hardware 3D acceleration with just about every Mac that included it. It also supported Apple's Game sprockets.

The last update for the Mac OS port was version 224b, which breaks network compatibility between it and the PC version, as well as lacking support for some user-created content made for 225 and 226f. Westlake Interactive, the company responsible for the port, claimed that previous patches were produced voluntarily in their free time, beyond their contractual obligations.^[7] They also stated that they did not receive the code for the 225 patch and that it had become unavailable due to Epic moving on to develop version 226.

Linux[link]

An unofficial content port of the Single-player maps to Linux was created by several users of icculus.org, which allowed the Unreal Singleplayer game content to be run as a modification for Unreal Tournament.^[8][9][10] The online retailer Tux Games at one point sold a box set including the Linux version.^[11][12]

References[link]