Released by Epic Games on the 26th of November, 1999, the original Unreal Tournament came out just a few days before id Software’s famous Quake 3 Arena. So, it is quite correct to say that Unreal Tournament became the progenitor of a new type of first-person shooters that focused on multiplayer. We should acknowledge that Unreal Tournament did have some kind of a plot. Based on the Unreal universe that was first depicted by Epic in its 1998 sci-fi shooter with the same name, the game described a deadly championship carried out by the powerful Liandri Corporation. The original Unreal offered the option of multiplayer, but it was rudimentary, like in most other FPS games released until that day, compared with what you had in UT.

A number of new game modes were added in Unreal Tournament to the classic Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag:

• Domination, in which the teams were fighting for control over key points on the map.
• Last Man Standing, where the players had hit points instead of frags, and the last player to be alive won.
• Assault was a team game on an asymmetric map where one team was attacking a base by performing a series of sequential tasks while the other had to keep the enemy off the key points and protect the base from the assault.

So, Unreal Tournament offered a much broader choice of game modes than Quake 3 Arena and also had a more exciting gameplay although the fans of id Software’s project would criticize it for being less dynamic. Besides the unique game modes, Unreal Tournament allowed using almost any weapon in multiple ways (the so-called alternative fire mode). This idea later became the visiting card of the UT series and was borrowed by other FPS developers.

We should also specifically note the integrated statistics system that would meticulously write down every detail of the player’s progress, and the advanced AI of the bots with flexible setup options. The latter fact was a strong argument of the UT community in the dispute with the fans of Quake 3 Arena which never had clever PC-controlled opponents. Wide modification options constituted another advantage of the game, giving birth to numerous mods and conversions created by the community of the game fans. That was one of the main reasons for the wide popularity of the Unreal Tournament series.

October 1, 2002, Epic Games released a sequel running on Unreal Engine 2. The game featured high-quality visuals and, even though was not such a sensation as its predecessor, won some recognition among people interested in classic multiplayer shooters. Unreal Tournament 2003 offered new and unique game modes such as:

• Bombing Run. It is a kind of football in which the player with the “ball” lacks any weapons and must rely on his teammates for protection as he advances to the enemy’s goal and scores.
• Invasion is a cooperative mode in which all the players fight against an invasion of AI-controlled aliens.
• Mutant is a kind of a king of the hill game. One player is a mutant with unlimited ammo and the advantages of speed and invisibility over the ordinary players. His goal is to kill as many “hunters” as possible. The player who kills the mutant becomes a mutant and the object of the hunt himself.

The plot of UT2003 was similar to the original and covered yet another Championship. The game provided a few new types of weapons. For some old weapons the fire mode was modified.

The next new game in the series, Unreal Tournament 2004, was released on the 16th of March, 2004. It was but slightly different from Unreal Tournament 2003 from a technical point of view, and ran on a modified version of Unreal Engine 2 that got a version number of 2.5. The gameplay had undergone more changes. Particularly, the player could now control combat machines, including space fighters, and use special weapons to oppose such machines with. This machinery was mostly called for in the new game mode called Onslaught vast levels had been developed for and in the Assault mode that was identical to the same-name mode of the original Unreal Tournament.

News about the development of a next game in the series appeared quite a long time ago. The project was first known under the traditional name of Unreal Tournament 2007 but it was later changed into Unreal Tournament 3 to indicate the use of the new Unreal Engine 3. Although the full version of the game is yet to be published, we can use the recently released demo version to check out what we can expect from the new game in terms of gameplay as well as graphics subsystem requirements.