Unreal Tournament 2004

[Olivie Inoue]

UnrealTournament is a first-person arena shooter video game developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. The second installment in the Unreal series, it was first published by GT Interactive in 1999 for Windows, and later released on the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast by Infogrames in 2000 and 2001, respectively. Players compete in a series of matches of various types, with the general aim of out-killing opponents. The PC and Dreamcast versions support multiplayer online or over a local area network. Free expansion packs were released, some of which were bundled with a 2000 re-release: Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition.

Unreal Tournament is an arena first-person shooter, with head-to-head multiplayer deathmatches being the primary focus of the game. The single-player campaign is a series of arena matches played with bots, where the player competes for the title of Grand Champion.[6] The player moves up the tournament ladder in order to challenge the current champion, Xan Kriegor, a mysterious being with exceptional skill.[7] Also available is a practice mode, in which, as its name implies, the player practices a match. Match settings (such as score and time limits) can be customized. Also available are "mutators", which drastically alter gameplay aspects, such as "InstaGib", which makes players compete with instant-kill Shock Rifles instead of the normal weapons.[8] Weapons include the Enforcer, the Rocket Launcher and the Ripper, which fires ricocheting blades. Each weapon has two firing modes which have different effects: for example, Rippers can also fire non-ricocheting blades that explode on impact. A special weapon is the Redeemer, which fires a miniature nuke and causes a large and powerful explosion.[9]

Items such as body armor (which reduces damage taken), health packs (which heal players) and damage amplifiers are scattered across levels.[10] Levels are set in a variety of environments, including spaceships, outposts and buildings like castles and monasteries.[11] Many contain features such as elevators (lifts) and teleporters and obstacles such as water and lava.[12] The game is backwards compatible with the majority of Unreal multiplayer maps.[13] The PC version includes a level editor in which players can create their own levels,[14] and the PlayStation 2 version supports the use of a USB keyboard and mouse, enabling players to play in a similar manner to the PC version.[15]

For team matches, bots are used to fill the roles of the player's teammates. The player can choose the bots' skill level or have it automatically adjust to the player's performance. Bots can be further customized by changing attributes such as names, appearance and weapon preferences.[16] In team matches, players can give orders to bots on their team.[17] The PC version supports multiplayer mode over the internet or a local area network (the original Unreal was mainly a single-player game).[18][19]

Four "bonus packs" were released, each adding maps, characters, or features. For example, Bonus Pack 1 adds "relics" as mutators.[26] Relics are special items that grant a significant advantage to their holder. They include (but are not limited to), the Relic of Vengeance, which creates an explosion when its holder dies, the Relic of Regeneration, which regenerates the health of the holder, and the Relic of Redemption, which makes its holder respawn elsewhere with full health and weapons intact when they would normally die.[27][28] Bonus Pack 4 adds a new version of Xan Kriegor.[29]

With a budget of $2 million, using 350,000 lines of C++ and UnrealScript, Unreal Tournament took around a year and a half to develop.[31] When Unreal (the first installment of the Unreal series) was released in May 1998, it was well received by the press, but it soon became apparent that the quality of the network code used for multiplayer matches was hampering the game's further success. In the months following Unreal's release, improving the game's multiplayer part became the top priority of the development team.[32] Epic Games started considering an official expansion pack intended to improve the network code while also featuring new maps and other gameplay elements.[31]

The team began work on the expansion in summer 1998, but the task became complicated by Epic's organizational structure. During the development of Unreal, the team members at Digital Extremes were working in Ontario, Canada, while the members at Epic were based in North Carolina, United States, requiring regular travel to Ontario. To remedy this, Epic decided to centralize the teams in Raleigh, North Carolina, and by September, work on the expansion could begin. Lead programmer Steve Polge set about laying the foundations for the new game types, such as Capture the Flag and Domination, and level designers created the first round of maps for testing. The content grew quickly, and soon the team realized that it had underestimated the task. In November, after a meeting with publisher GT Interactive, Mark Rein suggested releasing the work as a stand-alone game instead of an expansion. The team was reticent at first, but soon accepted the idea, and in December the game became known internally as Unreal: Tournament Edition.[31]

The development team for Unreal Tournament consisted of around 16 people.[31] Most team members had worked on Unreal, though Epic hired a number of new developers to reinforce the team. Programmer Brandon Reinhart was one such hire, joining Epic in August 1998 to help with the support of Unreal and the development of Unreal Tournament. That December, Reinhart discovered an Unreal mod called UBrowser, which provided a new user interface for finding multiplayer matches. After showing it to James Schmalz, the lead designer at Digital Extremes, Schmalz decided to hire the mod's author, Jack Porter. After only a few weeks Porter was already working with the team, replacing the game's existing menu system with his new interface.[31] Epic founder Tim Sweeney worked on improving the networking code along with Steve Polge, who also wrote code for AI, player physics and general gameplay.[31][33] Erik de Neve was responsible for the LOD character rendering, and various extra optimizations.[34]

During the game's development, the team lacked artists. The art director at Epic Games, Shane Caudle,[35] and the artists at Digital Extremes could not make enough new textures because of the amount of diversity in characters and maps. To help with the skin and texture production, Epic contracted Steve Garofalo.[31] The game's level and content management program, UnrealEd, was written in Visual Basic and considered buggy, but no one had time to fix it. The game engine had an object-oriented design, and the scripting language, UnrealScript, was considered to be more like Java. The modularity of the object-oriented design meant that programmers could make large changes without affecting other parts of the game. Other tools used during development included Microsoft Visual Studio and 3D Studio Max.[31] All of the weapon sound effects were created by Sonic Mayhem.[36] The soundtrack for the game, which employed the system of module files,[37] was written by Alexander Brandon, Michiel van den Bos, Andrew Sega, Dan Gardopee, Peter Hajba and Tero Kostermaa.[38][39] Unreal Tournament had support for the EAX Version 2.0 3D positional audio technology by Creative Labs and A3D 2.0 HRTF technology by Aureal Semiconductor out of the box.[40]

In 1999, Epic Games released a playable demo on September 16.[33] This version of the demo was only compatible with Glide-based accelerators.[41] An updated demo version, with support for OpenGL and Direct3D cards, was released on September 28.[42] Unreal Tournament went gold (became ready for release) on November 16,[1][43] shipping a few days later on November 22. The Mac version went gold on December 15.[44] The Dreamcast version was developed by Secret Level, who had to drop Assault mode, along with many larger maps, due to the Dreamcast having insufficient memory.[21] Linux port of Unreal Tournament was also in development.[45] The goal of the project was to improve the quality of the Linux port of the game as well as strengthen the mod authoring community and teach Epic about open source projects.[45] In 2000, Loki Software made an exclusive agreement with Epic Games to maintain and support the Linux version of Unreal Tournament, offering new features, addressing any technical issues and achieving revision parity with the Windows version.[46] Bonus Pack 1 was released on February 25, 2000.[47] Unreal Tournament was re-released in fall (autumn) 2000 as Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition, which includes the first three bonus packs and mods such as Rocket Arena, a one-on-one combat mode.[48][49][50]

In the United States alone, Unreal Tournament sold 100,998 copies by the end of 1999, according to PC Data.[101] The game's sales in the country reached 128,766 copies, for revenues of $5.42 million, by early 2000. This placed it behind competitor Quake III: Arena over the same period.[102] From January through October 2000, Unreal Tournament sold 234,451 units and earned $8.94 million in the region.[103] The game ultimately received a "Silver" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA),[104] indicating sales of at least 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom.[105] By November 2001, Unreal Tournament's total sales were close to 2 million units.[106]

Upon its release, Unreal Tournament received universal acclaim from critics, earning an overall score of 92 out of 100 on aggregate review website Metacritic.[51] Similarly, Unreal Tournament earned an overall score of 94% on the video gaming review aggregator GameRankings.[100] Mainstream press reviews lauded the title for its graphics, gameplay and level design, with Computer and Video Games calling it "a technical and game-playing marvel".[56] In March 2000, Unreal Tournament was second on a list of best-selling games in Computer Dealer News trade magazine,[107] but the development team believed sales would have been higher if the game was released in October 1999.[31]

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