It is still a surprise to see an original game maker support the archiving and modding of their old games but that goes double for when it’s a company as big as Epic Games. The OldUnreal fan community announced at the end of October that Epic had given them the go-ahead to link to the ISO files on Archive.org and include their own fan patches for Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament: GOTY Edition. The company then confirmed the news to Polygon earlier this week stating that both games “are available on Archive.org and people are free to independently link to and play these versions”.
Knowing that the ISOs are freely available is great but getting the games to run on modern PCs still requires some extra work. That’s where OldUnreal has gone a step further and created installers for Unreal and Unreal Tournament that cleverly download the ISOs, extract them to your PC, and install their custom patches for bug fixes and compatibility tweaks. You’ll still have to do some hoop-jumping to play them online today but the ut99.org community is there to help with that side of things.
I’ll update the pages on the site for both Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament: GOTY Edition with these officially consecrated methods soon.