Unreal is a 1998 first-person shooter game developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and published by GT Interactive for Microsoft Windows. Set in a science-fiction universe, the player controls a prisoner whose prison spacecraft crash-lands on a mysterious planet, where they must find a way to escape while combatting the occupying alien empire. It is the first entry in the Unreal game series and was powered by the titular Unreal Engine. The game reached sales of 1.5 million units by 2002.
Since the release of Unreal, the franchise has had many entries including one sequel and a spin-off series with multiple commercially successful and award winning games based on the Unreal universe referred to as the Unreal Tournament series. One official bonus pack, the Epic-released Fusion Map Pack, can be downloaded free of charge. Unreal Mission Pack I: Return to Na Pali, developed by Legend Entertainment, was released in June 1999, and added 17 new missions to the single-player campaign of Unreal. Unreal and Return to Na Pali would later be bundled together with the updated version of the game's engine from Unreal Tournament and released as Unreal Gold. In 2024, the game officially became freeware with Epic Games’ blessing.
Plot The player takes on the role of Prisoner 849, aboard the prison spacecraft Vortex Rikers. During transport to a moon-based prison, the ship is pulled to an uncharted planet, before reaching its destination. The ship crash-lands on the lip of a canyon on the planet Na Pali, home of the Nali, a primitive tribal race of four-armed humanoids. The Nali and their planet have been subjugated by the Skaarj, a race of savage yet technologically advanced reptilian humanoids, who also have an army of genetically engineered Brutes and an enslaved race of warriors, known as the Krall. Skaarj troops board the downed Vortex Rikers and kill the remaining survivors, except for Prisoner 849, who manages to find a weapon and escape from the ship.
The planet Na Pali is rich in "Tarydium", a mineral that is found as light blue crystals, possessing a high energy yield and are the reason the Skaarj have invaded. The Vortex Rikers had crashed near one of the many mines and processing facilities that the Skaarj have built. Prisoner 849 travels through the mines, meeting Nali slaves along the way and eventually reaching the ruins of Nali temples, villages and cities, where the extent of the Nali's suffering and exploitation become clear. The player passes through a water temple and a massive arena, where the player must kill a giant beast called a Titan.
Throughout the game, the player stumbles upon the remains of other humans, often with electronic journals that detail their last days and hint toward the cause of their demise. Usually, these tales are of desperate struggles to hide from the Skaarj, or other bloodthirsty inhabitants of the planet. The player never meets another live human, aside from a wounded crew member on the bridge of the prison ship, who gasps and dies immediately. Prisoner 849 is likely the only human alive on the planet Na Pali throughout the duration of the game.
Prisoner 849 continues to make their way through a series of alien installations, a second crashed human spaceship and ancient Nali temples infested with Skaarj troops and their minions, before eventually arriving at the Nali Castle. Inside the castle, the prisoner locates a teleporter that leads to the Skaarj Mothership. The mothership proves to be a vast labyrinth, but Prisoner 849 manages to find and destroy the ship's reactor, whilst fighting their way through hordes of Skaarj. The reactor's destruction plunges the vessel into darkness and after navigating the ship's corridors in the dark, the player finally arrives at the Skaarj Queen's chamber, where they fight and ultimately, kill the Queen. Prisoner 849 jumps into the Queen's personal escape pod as the mothership disintegrates. Although the prisoner survives the horrors of Na Pali, their escape pod is left to drift in space, with only a slim hope of being found.
Expansion plot The expansion, Return to Na Pali, developed by Legend Entertainment, picks up not long after Unreals ending; Prisoner 849 is found by a human warship, the UMS Bodega Bay. The Unified Military Services (UMS) conscript the prisoner into service, upon learning their identity, forcing Prisoner 849 to return to Na Pali in order to locate the downed ship UMS Prometheus. There, the prisoner is ordered to retrieve some weapons research. In return, the prisoner will receive a full pardon and transportation back to Earth, though the real plan is revealed to be maintaining the secrecy of the mission, by killing the prisoner immediately after the information is secured.
Upon arriving at the Prometheus, Prisoner 849 finds the secret weapons log, but soon after, they find a working radio communicator nearby. The prisoner listens to a recently recorded and archived conversation between the Bodega Bay and a nearby space station, the UMS Starlight, exposing the military's treachery. As Prisoner 849 transmits the research log, a squad of marines beam on board Prometheus, intending to eliminate the prisoner who manages to escape into a nearby mine system.
Once again, Prisoner 849 is forced to traverse a series of alien facilities and Nali temples, in an attempt to locate another way off the planet. Eventually, the prisoner ends up at another Nali Castle, where a small space shuttle is stored. After fighting through Skaarj, Krall and other monsters, the prisoner battles the final opponent, a Skaarj Warlord, before killing it and managing to take off in the spacecraft. Bodega Bay, however, is waiting in orbit and launches a missile at the prisoner's ship. The prisoner outmanoeuvres the missile, and leads it back to Bodega Bay on a collision course. The large ship is disabled by the ensuing blast, and Prisoner 849 escapes into space.
Development Unreal was jointly developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and mostly funded with the proceeds from Epic Pinball, Epic's best selling shareware game. In the February 1997 issue of Next Generation, lead designer James Schmalz recalled how it started:
While the team still had only the outdoor terrain and the dragon in place, Intel invited Epic MegaGames to demonstrate Unreal to them. Following the demonstration, Intel told them about their upcoming MMX instruction set. Sweeney was immediately excited by the possibilities MMX presented, and put together a working MMX version of the rendering code before Epic had even received a chip with MMX.
Originally, Unreal was going to feature a large status bar and centered weapons, similar to Doom and Quake. As development progressed, various levels were cut from development. A few of these levels reappeared in the Return to Na Pali expansion pack. A number of enemies from early versions are present in the released software, but with modifications and improvements to their appearance. One monster that didn't make the cut was a dragon. One of the weapons shown in early screenshots was the "Quadshot" – a four-barreled shotgun; the model remains in-game, while there is no code for the weapon to function (several user-made modifications bring the weapon back in the game). Another weapon shown was a different pistol, but this may have just been an early version of the Automag. At one point, the rifle could fire three shots at once, which is wrongly stated as the alternate fire in the Unreal manual that comes with Unreal Anthology.
Initially the game's player character was to be female, but as the number of games with female playable characters increased, the team decided to allow the player to select from a male character and a female character.
In late 1996 GT Interactive secured exclusive global publishing rights to Unreal.
With the game still in development, Epic MegaGames started work on a port for the Nintendo 64DD. Mark Rein revealed that while a port for the standalone Nintendo 64 was possible, the limited storage space of the cartridge format would have necessitated heavy compromises to the details on the monsters and the number of unique textures. A Dreamcast port was also planned, and was in fact demoed for the system's capabilities early on its lifecycle, but was canceled when GT Interactive entered financial struggles (one of the reasons they would be purchased by Infogrames in 1999), and a port of Unreal Tournament would take its place in 2001.
Since Unreal came packaged with its own scripting language called UnrealScript, it soon developed a large community on the Internet which was able to add new modifications, or mods, in order to change or enhance gameplay. This feature greatly added to the overall longevity of the product and provided an incentive for new development. A map editor and overall complete modification program called UnrealEd also came with the package.
Unreals method of creating maps differs in major ways from that of Quake. The bundled UnrealEd map editor uses the Unreal engine to render scenes exactly as they appear in-game, as opposed to external editors like Worldcraft attempting to recreate it with different methods. Whereas Quake maps are compiled from a variety of different components, Unreal maps are inherently editable on the fly. This allows anybody to edit any map that is created, including the maps included with the game.
Graphics The Unreal engine brought a host of graphical improvements rarely seen at that time. Unreals software renderer allowed software features as rich as the hardware renderers of the time, including colored lighting and even a limited form of texture filtering referred to by Sweeney as an ordered "texture coordinate space" dither.Yong, Li Sheng. Texturing As In Unreal, flipcode.com, July 10, 2000. Early pre-release versions of Unreal were based entirely on software rendering.
Unreal was one of the first games to utilize detail texturing. This type of multiple texturing enhances the surfaces of objects with a second texture that shows material detail. When the player stands within a small distance from most surfaces, the detail texture will fade in and make the surface appear much more complex (high-resolution) instead of becoming increasingly blurry.6.20 Detail Textures , OpenGL.org, August 6, 1999. Notable surfaces with these special detail textures included computer monitors, pitted metal surfaces aboard the prison ship, golden metal doors, and stone surfaces within Nali temples. This extra texture layer was not applied to character models. The resulting simulation of material detail on game objects was intended to aid the player's suspension of disbelief. For many years after Unreals release (and Unreal Tournaments release), detail texturing only worked well with the S3 MeTaL and Glide renderer. It was, in fact, disabled in the Direct3D renderer by default (but could be re-enabled in the Unreal.ini file) due to performance and quality issues caused by the driver, while it was present even on hardware many times more powerful than the original S3 Savage3D and 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics.