Unreal

Epic Megagames published the First-Person-Shooter Unreal on Memorial Day 1998, having been in development by Epic and Digital Extremes for about three years.

It was seen as a major competitor to Id Software's Quake series, but its technology was a little superior to the then published Quake 1 and 2.

Since it was basically as scriptable and customizable as Quake and featured its own scripting language UnrealScript?, it soon had a large community on the internet which added new modifications to it to change or enhance game play.

In its primary version (just labeled "Unreal"), the focus lay on the single player aspect. Epic Games soon published the new "Unreal Tournament", though, which had its focus on Multiplayer only and competed against Id's Quake 3 Arena.

Since then, many other companies in the business have licensed the underlying "Unreal Engine" to speed up development by not building their own game engine from scratch, including e.g. the Star Trek 3rd person adventure "Deep Space Nine The Fallen" or Ion Storm's "Deus Ex".

Unreal's sequel "Unreal II" is announced for Q2 2002.