Fan community announces it will revive Unreal Tournament 2004 with Epic’s blessing: ‘We’re doing this for free because we’re fans of the game and we like a challenge’

So-called boomer shooters make up a whole FPS subgenre now—but what about their multiplayer counterparts, the arena shooters of old? Most of them are ruled by diehard niches of expert players or straight-up unplayable today. Unreal Tournament 2004 has spent a long time somewhere between those two categories: it boasts a legendary albeit small modding scene but has been unavailable to buy on digital storefronts for years. As of this past week, though, that’s set to change.

OldUnreal, the same fan community that Epic gave the greenlight to revive both the original Unreal and UT99, announced Wednesday on Discord that it’s getting a similar chance to take custody of UT2004. You can read a transcription of the post in thread from roX1337 on the Unreal Tournament subreddit, which states “We are going to publish an installer that downloads the original disc image for UT2004, installs the game, and applies patches to it. We are also going to start publishing patches that modernize the game, make it compatible with Windows Vista or later, Linux x86-64 and aarch64 (Raspberry Pi and similar), and Mac OS 10.9 or later, fix bugs, and implement quality-of-life changes.

Yes, you read that right. UT2004 will soon be available to download once again. Free of charge. This is a community-run effort but we’re excited to make the game easier to access and play again.”

The announcement includes a FAQ that confirms some details, like plans for a public test version to release within two months. It adds that any prospective testers should keep an eye out for an announcement in the coming weeks; and if you’ve been playing the official version this whole time and just want to keep doing that, the FAQ states that “for the most part” the patched and unpatched clients will be compatible in multiplayer.

I don’t have much experience with UT (though I do enjoy the original Unreal), but this seems like an ideal scenario for preservation. I’ve long dreamed of a future where all the dead MMOs of my childhood could be maintained this way, after all.

It’s not easy to pull off, though. As the OldUnreal team states in its announcement: “We’re doing this for free because we’re fans of the game and we like a challenge. In fact, projects like these cost us a bit of money for server hosting, software licenses and subscriptions, certificates, etc, as we independently operate the games ourselves.”