Unreal Tournament: Ultimate Console Map Pack (WIP)

As a celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Unreal Tournament, I've been quite busy working on this for the last couple of months: the "Ultimate Console Map Pack".

The original Unreal Tournament has been released for PC, PlayStation 2 and Sega Dreamcast back in the day, where each version had its share of exclusive maps. Epic Games, the creators of the game, made a bunch of exclusive levels for the PS2 version, 14 in total. And later Secret Level was tasked with making Dreamcast port, where they've added 23 Deathmatch maps.

My dream always was to have all the maps playable in the PC version as one grand collection. But while there have been attempts of this in the past, there never has been a complete and accurate collection of all these console maps. So, it's like they say: if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself...

Luckily, it's not like I had to recreate these levels from scratch. There has been a leak of the beta versions of Epic's PS2 levels, at least most of them. And the Dreamcast exclusive maps all got made by modifying levels that Epic employees made for the "Rocket Arena" mod.

For the Dreamcast maps I basically had to recreate their creation process. I had to extract the arena from the Rocket Arena map and then add level screenshots, music, player spawns, weapons and items as they are in the Dreamcast versions. I also had to modify some of the environments here and there, but only in rare cases. Making all of this took the longest, but mostly because of the sheer number of maps.

Some of the PS2 maps also needed some heavy editing, where one of the maps, DM-Sorayama, still remains in its beta version, which is missing one entire half of the map. I'm not sure I'll ever do this... Luckily, the only missing map, CTF-Sundial, was remade faithfully for the PC by Jeroen Van Sweeveldt, so I could use that.

 

Without further ado, here is the complete list of all maps, which is a hell of a lot... Let's start with the maps that got made for the PS2 version (14/16 in total):

 

• CTF-PS2-Phalanx
• CTF-PS2-Sepulchre
• CTF-PS2-Spirito
• CTF-PS2-Stormfront
• CTF-PS2-Sundial
• DM-PS2-Brickyard
• DM-PS2-CanyonFear
• DM-PS2-Coagulate
• DM-PS2-Core
• DM-PS2-Flux
• DM-PS2-Hood
• DM-PS2-Loathing
• DM-PS2-SorayamaBeta
• DOM-PS2-Coagulate
• DOM-PS2-Hood
• DOM-PS2-Osiris

The DOM (Domination) versions of Coagulate and Hood were actually only playable on the Dreamcast, but their PS2 counterparts already had the necessary control points in them, so this was easy to change.

The Dreamcast exclusive maps then were the following (23 in total):

• DM-DC-Babylon
• DM-DC-BlockParty
• DM-DC-ColdSteel
• DM-DC-Damnation
• DM-DC-Depot
• DM-DC-Dust
• DM-DC-Gearbox
• DM-DC-Girder
• DM-DC-Google
• DM-DC-Halberd
• DM-DC-Industrial
• DM-DC-Infernal
• DM-DC-Instinct
• DM-DC-Megaplex
• DM-DC-Nebula
• DM-DC-NeoTokyo
• DM-DC-Outskirts
• DM-DC-Paladin
• DM-DC-Pantheon
• DM-DC-Sector9
• DM-DC-Singularity
• DM-DC-StationControl
• DM-DC-Underlord

As already mentioned, all of these were originally "Rocket Arenas" and got items, weapons and so on added to them for their Dreamcast appearance.

Now, I've also been working on a couple of bonus maps:

• CTF-PS2-Fortress
• DM-PS2-Gutter
• DM-PS2-Osiris
• DOM-PS2-Brickyard
• DOM-PS2-Loathing
• TDK-DC-Nebula

Fortress and Gutter are maps that were made for the PS2 versions, but got cut in the end. Osiris was originally a Deathmatch map, where I had to add the control points for Domination. But I thought it would be nice to keep the DM version as well.

Also, I've discovered that both the beta version of Brickyard (which took a lot of editing to turn it into its final DM version), as well as DM-Loathing had control points in them, which I've used for some bonus Domination maps.

The "Tournament Darkmatch" version of Nebula was more or less an accidental product, but it was fun, which is why I've added this as well. Before this project I didn't even know that Unreal Tournament had this hidden game mode, where you fight in the dark with flashlights, which is probably a remain from Unreal.

Finally, some of the PC maps got altered for the console counterparts, where this pack aims at including these edited maps as well:

• AS-HiSpeed-PS2
• CTF-Command-DC
• CTF-Coret-DC
• CTF-Dreary-DC
• CTF-LavaGiant-DC
• CTF-Niven-DC
• DM-Agony-DC
• DM-Barricade-DC
• DM-KGalleon-PS2
• DM-Malevolence-DC
• DM-Phobos-DC

This list is still missing a couple of maps, most notable the PS2 versions of CTF-Dreary, CTF-November and CTF-Niven, which is one of the reasons, why this is still work in progress.

But I'll be taking a break from this project from now on, where I just wanted to share the current status with this post. Once I'm ready to release this to the public, I'll provide an update.