Not every gaming series thrives as much as The Legend of Zelda, where some are long in the past, but never truly forgotten. One of these series is Unreal, which had its 25th anniversary last year, but it's really the multiplayer-focused sequel that has defined the series for what it is best remembered for: old-school Arena Shooter action.
It doesn't feel that long since its 20th Anniversary, because not much has happened in the meantime, at least nothing positive. Instead, the series reached a new low in early 2023, where Epic Games shut down all master servers and took all the Unreal games from online stores (see the End of Unreal). But the hardcore fans kept the series alive with community servers and patches, where you can even find the games for free on the Internet Archive, which has the blessing from Epic Games.
But that's not all... Unreal Tournament is going to be featured as an episode in a new anthology series, from the creators of Love, Death & Robots, called Secret Level. It's coming to Amazon Prime on December 10th and you can find some great clips of what to expect, like this one or that one.
This is absolutely mind-blowing to me. I've been quite busy in the last couple of weeks, because I was moving,
so I only had caught glimpses of this until today. And I actually assumed that this
was some very ambitious fan project for the 25th Anniversary... but it's fully official! Keep in mind that this is for a franchise where the "biggest" new thing happening to it in the last five years were weapon models in Warframe, so it's quite unbelievable to see this. It feels unreal.
The premise seems to be a prequel to Unreal Tournament, where Xan Kriegor and its gang of Liandri mining robots were condemned to fight in the tournament. I'm not 100% sold on the stylistic choices, but I'm absolutely excited to see this nevertheless.
Curiously, "Secret Level" is also the name of the studio that made the Dreamcast version of Unreal Tournament, which brings me back to another project... one of mine, actually. With the 20th anniversary I've started working on an Ultimate Console Map Pack for the game, which features all console-exclusive maps in a faithful way. The project came to a halt, however, after it was about 95% done, but it's slowly getting back on track to get in the missing parts with some support from the community... I won't make any promises, but I really want to finish this at some point. And right now seems like a very good time to get back into the game.
Happy Birthday, Unreal Tournament!
