It makes me feel so old that this now qualifies as Retro Gaming. Like, I know it is, but it just feels wrong.
Yeah, hard to imagine that my introduction to this game is already 25 years ago. One of my highschool classmates lived right next to the school and he had something to show us. The epic intro music, seeing that Skaarj at the end of the vent shaft through the volumetric fog..
Just mind-blowing, I was still used to things like Duke Nukem 3D in those days, Unreal was such a step forward. And that soundtrack.. unforgettable, I still listen to it regularly.
Half-Life came out so quickly after Unreal, I feel that the latter got overshadowed by it. Which is a shame, as it was an excellent game in its own right that's been underappreciated.
Unreal Tournament was our favorite LAN game back in the 00s, I can still see the facing worlds map if I close my eyes.
UT99 was one of my best if not the best gaming times I had in my life. Unreal was godlike too ofc.
Legendary. UT2K is still the pinacle of arena shooters.
I still remember seeing the original Unreal castle fly through in a computer store and realising that 3D accelerator cards had changed everything. Many hours spent tweaking config files to squeeze everything out of a 3dfx voodoo card for UT. Halcyon days. It's a real shame that Epic went on to sh1t all over it's original fans and pull the unreal series from digital stores to push their micro transaction fortnite garbage. I feel privileged to have lived through the 90's and early 2000's era of PC gaming with such titles in comparison to today's industry.
What's bonkers to me is realizing that this is only two years after quake 1, which in turn was only three years after doom, which was less than a year after wolfenstein 3d. We went from Wolfenstein 3d to Unreal in 6 years.
I remember that, too. It feels to me like some time around 2010, game graphics finally reached a stride where they all looked quite good, and any further development since then has been incremental... but for that first decade, it was unbelievable how rapidly it was progressing.
What's really bonkers is that in 1 generation we went from 8bit blocks on the screen to photo realistic 3D scenes. It's been incredible to see an entire industry appear in 1 lifetime.
Totally agree that what comes next will be incremental. We won't see that rate of advancement again, and more sadly we don't seem to see the experimentation either, at least not in the mainstream publishers. The 90's and early millenium was mad with everything from doom to MDK, deus ex, citizen kabuto, command and conquer, Nox, homeworld, mad experiments in voxel engines like Outcast, space sims like freelancer and freescape. Today it's much more risk averse with incremental updates to established franchises, unless you delve into the indie gaming scene. But that's also been cool to see re emerge like the legacy of the 80's bedroom programmers.
