Unreal Tournament

Unreal Tournament is a first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was first published in 1999 by GT Interactive for Microsoft Windows. Infogrames released it for the PlayStation 2, and Sega Studios San Francisco (known as Secret Level at the time) released it for the Dreamcast home consoles. The game is based on the same technology that powered Unreal, but the design of Unreal Tournament shifted the series' focus to competitive multiplayer action.

Gameplay

Unreal Tournament was designed as an arena first-person shooter, with head-to-head multiplayer deathmatches being the primary focus of the game. The game's single-player campaign is essentially a series of arena matches played with bots. For team matches, bots are again used to fill the roles of the player's teammates. Even on dedicated multiplayer servers, bots are sometimes used to pad out teams that are short on players.

Unreal Tournament is known and widely praised for its bot artificial intelligence (AI), the product of programmer Steve Polge who had earlier risen to fame by designing the Reaper Bot for Quake, one of the earliest examples of an effective deathmatch bot. The player can choose a bot skill level (anywhere from "Novice" to "Godlike") or set it to automatically adjust to the player's performance. Bots can be further customized by changing names, appearance, accuracy, weapon preferences, awareness, and so forth.

Unreal

Unreal is a first-person shooter video game developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and published by GT Interactive 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 in June 1999, and added new missions to the single player campaign of Unreal. Unreal and 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

The player takes on the part of Prisoner 849, aboard the prison spacecraft Vortex Rikers. During transport to a moon-based prison, the ship is 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, except for Prisoner 849, who manages to find a weapon and escape from the ship.

Tournament

A tournament is a competition involving a relatively large number of competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses:

These two senses are distinct. All golf tournaments meet the first definition, but while match play tournaments meet the second, stroke play tournaments do not, since there are no distinct matches within the tournament. In contrast, football (soccer) leagues like the Premier League are tournaments in the second sense, but not the first, having matches spread across many stadia over a period of up to a year. Many tournaments meet both definitions; for example, the Wimbledon tennis championship.

Epic Games

Epic Games, Inc., also known as Epic and formerly Epic MegaGames, is an American video game development company based in Cary, North Carolina, now associate of Chinese Tencent Holdings. They are well known for their Unreal Engine technology, which has powered their popular in-house Unreal series of first-person shooters, and the Gears of War series for the Xbox 360.

It is the parent company of game developer Chair Entertainment. It has also set up studios in Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo. Key developers at Epic Games include chairman, CEO and technical director Tim Sweeney, and lead programmer Steve Polge. Jerry O'Flaherty was the studio art director from 2003 to 2007. Chris Perna has been the art director since O'Flaherty's departure from the company. Cliff Bleszinski, Epic's design director, announced his departure on October 3, 2012.

History

Epic MegaGames (1991–1999)

Epic Games was initially founded under the name of 'Potomac Computer Systems' in 1991 by Tim Sweeney in Rockville, Maryland, releasing its flagship product, ZZT, the same year. During the latter portion of ZZT's life span, the company became known as Epic MegaGames and subsequently released numerous popular shareware games, including Overkill, Tyrian, Epic Pinball, Brix, Dare to Dream, Jill of the Jungle, Kiloblaster, Xargon, Solar Winds, Ken's Labyrinth, Jazz Jackrabbit, Radix: Beyond the Void, and One Must Fall: 2097. During this time, Epic also published and sold games developed by other developers such as those by Safari Software and also XLand's Robbo, Heartlight, and Electro Man; and Renaissance's Zone 66.