Unreal

Unreal was released within six months after Quake II, a game which it resembles in many ways and whose main competition it became.

Technical Stuff

Hooked on Glide

Ten years later, Unreal is technically more problematic than Quake II. While the Quake series was built on OpenGL, the Unreal engine is linked closely to the Voodoo chip and Glide API. Direct3D support was added as an afterthought, in form of a patch half a year after the initial release, at first only for Matrox cards, later for all Direct3D-compatible accelerators. But it never ran as well as under Glide. Sure, it looks impressive enough, but in the dark corners the shading won't work correctly.

The best way to play Unreal is thus to build a dedicated PC. It should have a CPU of about 1GHz, more will hardly make a difference, and ideally a Voodoo 5 card. A Voodoo 3 should do as well, the difference is mainly the lower color depth (16-bit instead of 32-bit) and a slightly lower performance. Another option is to use a Glide wrapper. The screenshot at the top of the page was taken using zeckensack's Glide wrapper, which renders up to 1280×1024 16-bit.

OpenGL

With patch 224, OpenGL support was added. For some strange reason, the option does not show up in the menu of Unreal Gold, though the driver is present. You have to manually edit the Unreal.ini, changing

GameRenderDevice=D3DDrv.D3DRenderDevice

to

GameRenderDevice=OpenGLDrv.OpenGLRenderDevice

However, the original OpenGL driver can make the game crash on newer systems. You can get an updated driver from Old Unreal. It's worthwhile, OpenGL looks better than Direct3D.

Not on the German Index

Interesting enough, Unreal and Unreal Gold were never put on the index of media harmful to adolescents in Germany, though a collection of additional levels called Unreality would make it there on 1999-06-30. Unreal Tournament too escaped the gaze of the censors, but only for a while, it was put on the index along with the US version of Unreal Tournament 2003 on 2002-02-28.