Unreal Tournament 2004 Is Available To Play For Free And Epic Won’t Be Suing Anyone Over It

While I think there are a lot of things that Epic Games doesn’t do right, there is one thing that they’re better at than other devs. I’m speaking policy-wise. Unlike most developers, they’re not locking their old games away forever, preventing those who would preserve them from being able to do so.

As an example, PC Gamer reported over the weekend that Unreal Tournament 2004 is now available to play for free. Moreover, the shooter is now available on the Internet Archive, thanks to the efforts of a community project named OldUnreal. The team’s goal is preserve Epic’s shooters. To that end, they’ve also updated the game to make it playable on current PCs.

As is noted in PC Gamer’s article, it will take more effort to install this than it would a normal game, beginning with downloading it from the Internet Archive. A trip to GitHub will also be necessary to obtain the patch before getting the game running. This is the first public patch in over two decades, and it brings improvements, but the team does warn that there may still be bugs.

Still, a little extra work to install and some bugs are still better than the game disappearing forever.