The player’s character, an unspecified individual known only as Prisoner 849, starts his or her journey trapped in a wrecked prison vessel, the Vortex Rikers, which has crash-landed on an alien planet. Most first person shooters prior to Unreal were all about carnage and mayhem right from the start, but Epic’s game takes an approach not unlike Valve’s Half-Life released mere months later. After nearly a year of delay and hard work, Unreal finally became real on May 22nd 1998 (roughly one year later for MacOS). Some dropped stuff returned in an expansion pack released later. Lead designer Cliff Bleszinski said they could have made three different games with all the content created at that point, but they aimed at making one, perfect product. By this point lots of content was cut from Unreal, mostly due to time constraints and quality concerns. At first it worked, but eventually they have realized how hard it was to coordinate such a big project in this way, and every member of the team, sans musicians, soon travelled to Digital Extremes’ office in Waterloo, Ontario in Canada. Unlike other studios at the time, Epic and Digital Extremes members worked remotely from all over the world and people were recruited via internet, according to Elliot “Myscha” Cannon. According to Unreal Bible, Unreal was to be a shareware title just like any other game released by Epic up to this point, but the idea never came into fruition as retail distribution has become an industry standard in the following years.Īlong with the technology needed to run the game, the team worked on assets that would eventually become a fully-fledged product. Needless to say, all the assets seen there were scrapped as the engine was developed further. One of the first character models made for the game was a scantily clad woman (possibly a player character) and a dragon. All the maps were fantasy-themed, strongly reminiscent of Raven Software’s Heretic, as the game was initially to be set in such a world. Early tech demos provided a real-time demonstration of basic sound and rendering capabilities, lighting included, with scarce “gameplay” consisting only of the ability to shoot light sources within a level. Unreal had been in development as early as 1995, one year before the first Quake hit the shelves. While it made a huge impact at the time, the game itself was quickly overshadowed by newer releases and its own successor, despite being one of the milestones in PC gaming. Indeed, Unreal truly lived up to its name by kickstarting a revolutionary engine and putting Epic Games in position they are in nowadays. Epic Megagames, then known for being a shareware developer and publisher, were certainly not afraid of Quake, though many players believed Epic’s goal of making their own FPS game was out of this world. In 1997, iD raised the bar even higher with Quake II, but it wouldn’t be long until serious competition plunges into the fray. Their experience in this field and technology were unmatched, and while they had some stiff competition from a few studios like 3D Realms, many others developers’ attempts to best them were completely doomed. ID Software ruled the realm of PC first person shooters for most of the nineties.
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