Postmortems from Game Developer

Epic Games’UNREAL TOURNAMENT

by brandon reinhart

UNREAL TOURNAMENT, released in November 1999, was, in a way, an accident. After the original UNREAL was completed, Epic wanted to follow up the project with some sort of add-on pack. UNREAL multiplayer code was very poor, so the team felt that an expansion that improved multiplayer would be ideal. As feature lists grew and patches to UNREAL were released, the add-on turned into a complete and independent game.

UNREAL TOURNAMENT has certainly seen a very nontraditional development cycle, one that I feel would not have succeeded in any other genre. Ultimately, our decisions paid off, because the game earned more than five “Game of the Year” awards and is consistently rated in the top ninetieth percentile ...