Unreal Tournament 2004 is now free on PC after being revived by fans

Epic Games’ classic shooter Unreal Tournament 2004 has been resurrected by fans, with a new patch to make it run on modern PCs.

Although Epic Games’ most successful title in the modern gaming landscape is Fortnite, before that they were better known for Gears Of War and, before that, the Unreal series of games.

There were originally two flavours of Unreal games, one a primarily single-player first person shooter and the other a series of arena-based multiplayer titles called Unreal Tournament, with the ubiquitous Unreal Engine powering them both.

Unreal appeared in 1998, with Unreal Tournament a year later. Unreal only got one sequel but Tournament proved more popular and eventually hit the big time with the widely popular Unreal Tournament 2004.

There hasn’t been a legitimate way to play Unreal Tournament 2004 since Epic shut all the servers down in January 2023, and delisted the title from stores. However, thanks to fans, the shooter is now back and available to download and play for free.

The plans to revive Unreal Tournament 2004 were announced last year, as part of the OldUnreal community project to revive and update Epic’s early shooters. The community already got Epic’s approval to bring back Unreal Gold and 1999’s Unreal Tournament, and it’s now done the same with the 2004 game.

As for how you can claim the download, there are a couple of steps. The original disc image for Unreal Tournament 2004 is hosted on the Internet Archive, and while OldUnreal isn’t allowed to host the game outright, you can download it using an installer from the archive, hosted on OldUnreal’s website here.

After you’ve downloaded the game, you need to download a community patch via GitHub for Unreal Tournament 2004, which enables it to run on modern operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac.

In the release notes for the patch, OldUnreal project manager Stijn-volckaert wrote: ‘Please note that this is the first public patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 in over 20 years. ‘We have implemented numerous fixes and improvements, written a new SDL backend for Linux and macOS, and even a new renderer.

‘We have also migrated the entire codebase to modern build systems. Some new bugs may have slipped in!’

As a classic of the shooter genre, and for champions of game preservation, it’s good news all round. It’s also a bittersweet reminder of how Epic Games ditched development of the Unreal Tournament series in order to double down on Fortnite.

Although you’d have to say, from their point of view, that was unquestionably the right choice.

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