Jan 23, 2025  –  reviews/videogames⁠, played/1998⁠, played/2025

Source published on: 1998 ★★★★★

A few weeks ago, 27 years after playing Unreal (1998) for the first time, I played through its campaign again. It was amazing.

Re-experiencing the game

Item: Unreal
Rating: 5
Author: Juan Alonso

I only remembered the beginning of the game and some creatures like the Skaarj and the Nali, so as I played it was nostalgic because of how familiar it felt, and thrilling at the same time, because I was rediscovering most of the game.

You start the game as Prisoner 849 on a prison starship that has crash-landed on a planet called Na Pali. You start by exploring the ship and then the surrounding area where you start facing the first creatures and monsters. You later learn about the different enemy factions and how they abuse the peaceful indigenous nalis, tall people with four arms who when they meditate fly in mid-air. You eventually find and kill the boss of the bad guys, the Skaarj queen, and escape the planet on an escape pod that runs out of fuel right after leaving the planet.

I had forgotten how many puzzles there were in the game. Some were trivial, but for two I ended up looking up the solution after being stuck for 30 or 45 minutes. There was a particular one that felt unfair: there’s an area with a titan that doesn’t look like it can die and infinite waves of kralls coming out at you. I ran out of ammo trying to kill the titan and the kralls. You get out by touching a loose tile on a pillar. That felt like dirty trick number one. Then, a few minutes later, you get trapped in another room with more kralls spawning. You kill two waves and you see that they keep coming so you think “ok, same setup, let’s look for the lever.” But there’s no lever, you just need to kill a few more waves. It made me distrust the game designers for a while.

I got stuck a few more times but in more open and interesting spaces so a big part of the 15 hours it took me to finish the game was me running around in the very non-linear map layouts trying to figure out which lever or monster I had missed, or which door had opened.

I don’t think I paid too much attention to the notes left by survivors or by the nalis throughout the maps the first time I played. But this time I took the time to read them and I found several of them hilarious.

The eerie, mysterious, and beautiful soundtrack along with the fantastic locations completely transported me back to the Unreal world. As an introverted teenager with a vivid imagination, a love for fantasy, and who didn’t fit with kids my age, the adventure that games like this provided me with was a godsend.

Hardware

When I first played Unreal, I must have had a Pentium CPU because although I remember having an Athlon K7, that didn’t come out until 1999. I remember playing at the tiny resolution of 480x240 pixels because my PC didn’t have enough power to render the game at higher resolutions and the framerate would drop to 20fps and below. In those days I could tell the difference between 3-4 fps without looking at the frame rate counter. I remember buying a special Sound Blaster Live! sound card and a set of 5 surround speakers to get hardware-accelerated surround sound which Unreal supported via Creative EAX.

Playing the game now in 4K helped me feel immersed back into it and did not make the game feel as dated. Something I did notice in the first few minutes is why I bought a 100Hz Philips CRT back in the day. It’s 27 years later and I have a recent ~300€ monitor but its refresh rate is still 60Hz.

On a related note, kudos to the OldUnreal community which took over and maintained the OpenGL Unreal driver for many years and made it possible to enjoy the game in modern hardware.

What Unreal meant to me

Even if my subconscious had deleted most of the game details, it somehow must have kept some of their essence because over the years I remember dreaming I was in places that had an Unreal and Quake II feel. I have also used this vague memory of how the maps looked like to design fortresses and dungeons for my D&D campaigns.

As I write these lines and reflect on how I feel today after playing it again and how I remember feeling the first time I played it, I notice a strong sense of serenity and safety. Even though I’ve just seen first-hand how faint the details had become, and how much it got refreshed with this second gameplay, this memory which I know only exists in my mind, feels like it’s stored in a place outside of time and a strong part of my identity. It’s interesting.

After I first finished the single-player campaign, I started playing the game online because it has a multiplayer mode. I don’t remember many details other than “This is awesome!” and “I guess everybody else is also playing with 300-400ms of latency.” I think it was at about this time that I met two Spaniards who also loved the game, ZombiekE and Phantom3D. Looking forward to interacting with them more than just in-game, I learned how to make static websites and created my first website on Geocities called Forgotten Brotherhood with a tool called Macromedia Dreamweaver. After that, I learned how to make dynamic websites with PHP and I created 4unrealers.com which later turned into gamersmafia.com, a decades-long online gaming community and a playground for my programming and machine learning interests. My life would have likely turned out very different had someone else created a community, like Quake had at the time with 4quakers.com, and I had focused more on 3D modeling and map editing which I also loved at the time.

I don’t know if I will ever play it again so here is a generous collection of screenshots for future me and anyone else who has fond memories of the game. Thank you Epic, OldUnreal, and everybody I met on Unreal multiplayer servers, especially you, ZombieKe, and Phantom3D. :)

Vortex Rikers, the prison ship where you start the game.

Hiding inside a container. In Hard mode monsters one-shot you easily.

One of the scenes that I will never forget. Of course, I jumped, like the first time I played.

I think I got killed four times trying to cross this bridge. I swear every time I touched the bridge it broke in a different way.

The yellow floating shape is a Nali, a friendly indigenous inhabitant of Na Pali that looks like Dhalsim from Street Fighter, meditating cross-legged.

Some maps felt incredibly big, others, like this one, claustrophobic, so of course here is where you fill the place with assassin flies where you can’t see them coming or easily react to them.

Brought some flash-backs from Half-Life 2, a game that came out after Unreal.

The frigging room where you only get out by touching a lever in the center pillar, not visible on the screenshot.

This is what I mean with expansive maps. Imagine seeing this after playing Quake I, Duke Nukem 3D or Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Temples, mines, engine rooms, construction elevators, churches. The game had a bit of everything but the art, sound, music and themes made it all feel cohesive.

Naked woman with four boobies (sex), four arms (more sex), and wings (freedom). 🤤

Getting into that ship with two titans throwing rocks at me and 4 or so flying gasbags took 15+ attempts.

One of the traps that drove me insane. You open it by jumping below the keyhole. It felt like I was opening the gate with my nose.

Floor reflections that I couldn’t afford to switch on when I first played the game.

Epic knew how to make a planet look alien. I think my tendency to add extradimensional portals to my D&D campaign comes from games like Quake and Unreal

If you didn’t shoot the nalis and saved them from monsters, they would frequently show you hidden secrets with life, ammo and other items.

These calfs were very funny. They would suddenly jump into lava or get into places where I don’t think the game designers intended them to go like here. Here the calf is blocking the gate, and until it decided to go away. It was impossible to open it and free the calves inside so I waited. My vegan animal-loving wife would have been proud of me.

Catacombs with friendly Nali ghosts. The game really had everything.

And here you had to interact with everything on screen: dive, go to the top of the bell tower, find a way to activate the aerial platform that went along the rails.

The iconic castle that shows up during the intro.

The gasbag granddaddy, before falling prey to my skills. Yes the blood decorating the walls is his. 😎

This demon bastard took me more than 20 attempts. I didn’t have any PTSD when I entered the room during this game play, so I must have played on a pretty easy difficulty level the first time around.

This is one of the maps where I spent more than thirty minutes running around not knowing what to do after I had killed all the monsters and activated all the traps. I eventually found a tiny corner passage that I had missed before.

About to face the final boss, which, once you get the not so subtle indications with the jump boots and the middle floating platform packed with ammo and guns, is pretty easy to kill.

Next time I want to escape an exploding enemy base, remember to check the fuel gauge and look for one with enough fuel.

Played on Hard difficulty, the adventur me about 15 hours over 8 days.

Connections

Play: a fundamental part of being human.
FPS Golden Era: I feel very lucky to have been a teenager born when and where I was born and have been able to play the first first-person shooter games both in 2.5d and 3d.
Game design: an area of knowledge that must have developed a lot since Unreal was made and that still sounds fascinating. A couple of years ago I made a 2D RPG game in Javascript for fun and would love to get back, but time is limited…
Memories: it’s funny how much I value how I felt playing the game the first time even though my memory stored so few details. It’s as if in the end my mind simply kept this information: Playing Unreal felt amazing + 1-2 screenshots so that I could tell the game apart in the future. Nature loves compression and efficiency.