Unreal Gold goes free to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary

Unreal was released in 1998, and was the first game created in the titular engine. It would be hard to list all the ways the game pushed the industry into the future — from the tools given to players to create their own content to aggressive support for hardware graphics accelerators — so for the purposes of this post, let’s just agree to call the game historic.

And for the next 48 hours, you can get a free copy from GOG.com or Steam to celebrate Unreal’s 20th anniversary.

I can’t forget the first time I saw the Nali Castle FlyBy demo running on a system with a strong GPU; it felt like the game had somehow been able to open a window into the future. Nothing looked that good at the time, and the demo showed off the visuals at their utmost.

Then there’s the scene where you see the Skaarj warrior for the first time as the lights in the environment go off one by one. Unreal wasn’t just a technical achievement — it was an enjoyable experience to play. The visuals may look dated now, but this deal is a good way to take a look at one of the games responsible for building the modern games industry. And I bet you’re going to have some fun doing it.