Fun fact: The Stinger was supposed to behave like a dumbfire needler (before Halo, obviously). Epic simply could not figure out how to make it happen. Someone figured out how to do that a few years ago and the addition elevated the gun above a viable state.
The system requirements were also UNREAL for May 1998 when it was released. The fastest CPU available on the market, the P2 400 mhz, released just one month before Unreal, at a price of 824 $ could barely run the game at acceptable frame rates and only combined with a Voodoo 2 or Voodoo 2 SLI, which was ridiculous. You had to pay the value of a good car to be able to play at barely acceptable FPS.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 yes ! In fact the 83 MHz bus speed was not even mentionned in the doc. I just tried playing with the jumpers before I got it. Too bad, I don't remember the mainboard reference :( But I think many boards use the same chip for the clock. All I know is it was a TX chipset. I also used thermal paste, which was quite unusual for this period, since nobody did it. But I have a background in electronic, so it was an obvious solution for me.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 A friend of mine had a P2 233. But he had an Ati Mach64 video card, so comparaison for games was difficult. In fact he used an ISA video card before buying the expensive AGP Ati :) And Unreal ran quite well with this poor card.
По моменту где ты впервые встречаешь скаарджа в шахте раджигар видно, играл ли ты в анриал или нет до этого. если да, то будешь заранее знать что будет нападание и подготовишься к этому, а по тебе видно, что ты впервые проходил эту игру. у меня в ней 1000 часов, и я не могу оторваться. музыка - просто божественна, очень жаль что этой игре не повезло стать популярной, так ещё и все части анриал убрали из стима, даже голд, обидно.
Unreal and Na Pali are still my favorite classic 3D shooters and using the 4k textures and the native Apple silicon port of 227k, it still looks great in 2025 and performs like a dream. But even 1998 on a Voodoo 2 it was really fun to play, because we were not used to play games at a minimum of 60 fps.
Awesome reviews, so far every review a banger! I saw this game first when I was 3 years old ... you did it justice like you do with all these classics :) cheers
What a great video! And it was really helpful - I haven't been able to use my old Unreal Anthology program on my new computer, except for the Unreal 2 part, so it was great to get the tip to change the preferences to 32 bit on the older games - they work great now. Thank you Talking Skull!
@@ireneparkin3360 CliffyB was never CEO at Epic. Even when he joined Epic Megagames, CEO was already Tim Sweeney. That said, neither of those should be allowed touch Unreal, they will only ruin the franchise at this point.
I understood Unreal is truly special right after the first second of the game, I immediately noticed it’s graphics were like nothing we have seen before. Than the music, the huge open space levels, the atmosphere, it was fantastic.
1600% correct! And what an absolutely correct and 'Epic' name they gave it. Unreal. As beautiful as it was in software rendering mode, when you ran it on Glide and the sweet 3dfx logo came on! The detail textures if you stood really up close to the objects! There were two games in history when I froze in my tracks to listen to the music. First was Unreal, in the Depths of Rrajigar mines, when SharedDig began to play. Second was Adam Jensen's apartement in DX:HR. I'd say Halo:CE is an honorable mention also.
I don't know if it'd fit this series, but I'd love to know more about the mind(s) behind the Unreal engine Up to this point in the series, John Carmack was considered basically an unparalleled genius in his work, being leagues above and beyond any competition. But now Epic emerges and takes that from him Would love to find out more about the team or Tim Sweeney Might just be the way that Sweeney developed it that allowed others to make such impressive looking things?
There's a great interview with Tim Sweeney here if you're interested: www.gamedeveloper.com/design/from-the-past-to-the-future-tim-sweeney-talks It's where I pulled some of my quotes, including this gem that didn't make the video: "When I saw Wolfenstein for the first time, that was truly shocking. I'd never envisioned that you could do 3D in a computer game… it was this 3D game with real-time texture mapping; you know, real-time bitmaps scaled up and displayed in 3D on the screen. It never occurred to me that you could actually write code to do that. It was just another lack of foresight there. But seeing that for the first time, I was like, "Wow, I'm totally not worthy. I need to get out of programming now, because I'm never going to be able to compete with this." So they just basically demoralized me into becoming a manager for a few years."
John Carmack hasn't somehow got stupider or something, it just happens to be that Epic succeeded in the game engine licensing arena, while JC got bored at id and left to pursue hobbies like rocket science and VR and Artificial Intelligence
Thanks for covering a game that inspired me so much! I really dig your classic FPS series, thank you for making it! One bit of hopefully constructive criticism I'd like to give you is that your voice sound a bit unnatural. Maybe try to relax that a little bit? :) Maybe you think that your voice sounds bad or childish naturally, but you know - everybody has that when they start listening to their own voice recorded. Our voices are fine, it's just that we hear ourselves way more "bassy" from the "inside" and then when we hear what a microphone picks up we're shocked and embarrassed. But if you do it for a while both of these sounds blend into one and you start to like your own voice, and no longer think it's so thin and puny. I think recording with your voice played back through headphones and playing with it is a good way of shaking off that feeling and becoming comfortable with your own voice, no matter how it sounds. Of course everyone's voice is different and some people have lower voices than others, but it's not that only the "radio" people can be pleasant to listen to. Don't be afraid to be more natural! Hopefully that doesn't sound condescending, I'm just trying to share some experience hoping it'll be useful :) Take care!
Love the video. The narrator sounds like drummer from the expanse with major vocal fry but it is so nice to see my favourite game be reviewed by someone on the interwebs
I grew up with the Marathon series. It was my gateway FPS so to speak. Doom and Quake had amazing controls but the zombies and drab colours didn't appeal to me. Unreal was the first FPS since Marathon that made me really excited. It was beautiful, vibrant and atmospheric. It had aliens, great music and secondary firing modes. Well… that wasn't entirely true. There was another game around the same time that I was also looking forward to: Duality by Double Aught (you know, the people who made Marathon Infinity). I was still a teenager with a weekly allowance, so in the end I decided not to buy Unreal and wait for Duality instead. The deciding factor was that the Mac version of Unreal did not ship with a map editor while screenshots of Duality's editor Sandbox showed a Mac OS desktop. Duality was never released and I didn't play Unreal in full until last summer (Unreal Gold through Lutris on Linux). It still holds up incredibly well. It's still beautiful, vibrant and atmospheric. I do feel that many of its maps don't really hold up from a gameplay perspective though. Return to Na Pali was a massive improvement in that regard. The super-tanky enemies that you tend to fight one-on-one got monotonous really fast and the inventory system felt clunky to use.
I haven't liked these inventory systems at all, but they're in almost all of these old shooters. And for my money, Quake episodes 1 through 3 had the best level/encounter design in the genre from an action perspective. It's the one thing Unreal doesn't excel at. And RIP Duality. Thank you for sharing!
@@TalkingSkullGames it didn't surprise me in the slightst that the unreal engine became what it is today :) this was the first game 9i had to upgrade a computer that had a 3d graphics card already to play
@@TalkingSkullGames My friends were a bit into our games back then :) my neighbor at the time still rubs it in sometimes that his computer had a maths co-processor and could play doom before I could.
I owned this game for years w out giving it a shot. Most my friends are console players and dont really play fps. Once I started playing bots and realized there was a second function for weapons I realized how amazing this game really is. The maps are fun and unique as well. Its a shame Fortnight stole the thunder from this game. Out w the old in w the new I guess.... but maybe somehow Epic can incorporate the 2 amazing franchises.
Unreal 1998 touches elements that belong to classic RPG's stories like the Elder Scrolls: your character starts as a prisoner, you do not know how you ended up there and you will finish as a prisoner (not in the expansion though), you constantly read wall texts written in a mythical style ("the beast that came from the stars" from the aztec levels but you never meet any ancient monster, or it could mean that the Nalis were afraid of the Vortex Rikers arriving but the fact is that you enter several huge ships). This game is forgotten because of a "plot" whose visuals and atmosphere cannot make these things obvious.
Playing the game right now for the first time in 2 decades, and in some levels I'm getting lost at what to do more than in Hexen 2, which is impressive in the wrong way. Also most of the weapons just seem ... weak. Except for the flak cannon which is of course awesome. Maybe I just don't know how to use the others right.. until this video I didn't know that some weapons did extra headshot damage. It's still a really game though :) BTW the Skaarj remind me of the jaguar warriors from Hexen 2. I never realized (or maybe I plain forgot) that Unreal came out before Half-Life.
Unreal definitely took things in a different direction than just about anything else had done at the time -- you still had the corridors and mazes but now their purpose is just to provide contrast to the wide open spaces -- to make virtually breathing in that fresh air feel all the sweeter. I mean, you get at least one level where if you go off the main path you find a whole, fully explorable village. That all said, the exploration is by far the game's strongest point and I felt the actual combat could have been a lot tighter. It's not bad gunplay by any means and I love the creativity of the weapons, but your shots don't always seem to go where you want them to, enemies might be a little too evasive on top of that, and the game never quite seems to give out enough ammo supplies to reliably handle those problems -- it ends up turning into a lot of savescumming in the mid-late game when you think that you used a few too many resources that you might need later. I think it's a case of designers trying to have their cake and eat it too -- creating systems and enemy designs that can potentially allow any encounter to put pressure on the player and become a desperate fight for survival, but also trying to create a tight resource-management game at the same time -- when ultimately, those two styles of design aren't really very compatible (unless you feed one into the other, in the style of modern Doom). And funnily enough, the narration in the expansion always felt like a disconnect to me, this character I'm playing apparently despises the world they're in whereas here I am just basking in it. It is too bad that it got taken out of stores. I came to it pretty late but I am very glad I found it in time. Hopefully abandonware sites are taking up the task. Also had a lot of trouble getting that fan patch working properly on my system. Figured it out eventually but it's definitely the sort of thing that, depending on your system, I guess, could either be a cakewalk or a hellwalk. :D
While the atmosphere, textures and level design is way above Quake 2, I prefer Q2s gunplay and weapons waaay more. Unreal 1s fights felt very clunky and were much improved in UT.
Getting the copy of the game changed drastically, due to Epic's draconian and frankly extremely cowardly move to eliminate all traces of its glorious past. They don't want people to see how great the games of the past were, they don't want their Fortnite targets to suddently discover something better... Sad sad stuff. Oh well, luckily i already have all of the games in my libraries. Everyone else - aye, the high seas it is.
something a barely see talked about is Unreal's leveldesign. I think, it just sucks .There are so many same looking places. Getting lost on a space ship or a weird temple, to me, just isn't fun at all. It's reason while despite having tried multiple times, I never finished Unreal. I just got annoyed by wandering around. Something that doesn't happen to me in any other old school FPS
Some levels can be confusing and drag for way longer than they should (looking at you Chizra Temple and ISV Kran), but everything from Spire Village to the Mothership is a perpetual masterpiece, with the Temple of Vendora being a strong highlight before that too.
@@deus_nsf and the plot... what FPS do you start as a prisoner in? Have you asked yourself what it was what you did in order to end up there? In the azteks levels (chizra, next one) who is beast from the stars that nalis fear written as if it happened a long ago? So many things not so obvious.
Fun fact: The Stinger was supposed to behave like a dumbfire needler (before Halo, obviously). Epic simply could not figure out how to make it happen. Someone figured out how to do that a few years ago and the addition elevated the gun above a viable state.
The system requirements were also UNREAL for May 1998 when it was released. The fastest CPU available on the market, the P2 400 mhz, released just one month before Unreal, at a price of 824 $ could barely run the game at acceptable frame rates and only combined with a Voodoo 2 or Voodoo 2 SLI, which was ridiculous. You had to pay the value of a good car to be able to play at barely acceptable FPS.
I played Unreal ith a Voodoo 1, MMX 233 at 290 Mhz and Wine on Linux at 35 fps.
96 Mo ram.
@@nalinux wow a P1 at 290 mhz is impressive
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 yes !
In fact the 83 MHz bus speed was not even mentionned in the doc.
I just tried playing with the jumpers before I got it.
Too bad, I don't remember the mainboard reference :( But I think many boards use the same chip for the clock. All I know is it was a TX chipset.
I also used thermal paste, which was quite unusual for this period, since nobody did it.
But I have a background in electronic, so it was an obvious solution for me.
@@nalinux at 290 mhz it probably had a similar performance to a P2 233 mhz.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 A friend of mine had a P2 233. But he had an Ati Mach64 video card, so comparaison for games was difficult.
In fact he used an ISA video card before buying the expensive AGP Ati :)
And Unreal ran quite well with this poor card.
This channel is a good fine; Unreal, Quakem Blood, all the old classics live on! And the modern retro-renaissance FPS scene helps as well!
По моменту где ты впервые встречаешь скаарджа в шахте раджигар видно, играл ли ты в анриал или нет до этого. если да, то будешь заранее знать что будет нападание и подготовишься к этому, а по тебе видно, что ты впервые проходил эту игру. у меня в ней 1000 часов, и я не могу оторваться. музыка - просто божественна, очень жаль что этой игре не повезло стать популярной, так ещё и все части анриал убрали из стима, даже голд, обидно.
What make Unreal special? (without watching)
1) no intro
2) no talks
3) no cutscenes
4) no tutorials and tips
5) PDA stories
6) MUSIC
7. Flak cannon
8) The friendly Nali and the beauty of Na Pali
Well presented. Played it as a kid in early 2000's. Must reinstall.
Thank you!
Unreal and Na Pali are still my favorite classic 3D shooters and using the 4k textures and the native Apple silicon port of 227k, it still looks great in 2025 and performs like a dream. But even 1998 on a Voodoo 2 it was really fun to play, because we were not used to play games at a minimum of 60 fps.
Awesome reviews, so far every review a banger! I saw this game first when I was 3 years old ...
you did it justice like you do with all these classics :)
cheers
I found it papa
the videogame from my dreams when I was 12 years old
and it wasn't quake
Oops, none Quake
What a great video! And it was really helpful - I haven't been able to use my old Unreal Anthology program on my new computer, except for the Unreal 2 part, so it was great to get the tip to change the preferences to 32 bit on the older games - they work great now. Thank you Talking Skull!
the references to bungie are a bit strange, since they werent really a pillar, or very notable in any genre until halo
When the CEO of Epic left, he said that he wanted Epic to do a remake of this game. Too bad they abandoned it for Microtransactions and FORTNITE.
Tim Sweeney has never left Epic. What are you talking about?
@@marcdwonn9772 CliffyB
@@ireneparkin3360 CliffyB was never CEO at Epic. Even when he joined Epic Megagames, CEO was already Tim Sweeney. That said, neither of those should be allowed touch Unreal, they will only ruin the franchise at this point.
I understood Unreal is truly special right after the first second of the game, I immediately noticed it’s graphics were like nothing we have seen before. Than the music, the huge open space levels, the atmosphere, it was fantastic.
1600% correct! And what an absolutely correct and 'Epic' name they gave it. Unreal. As beautiful as it was in software rendering mode, when you ran it on Glide and the sweet 3dfx logo came on! The detail textures if you stood really up close to the objects! There were two games in history when I froze in my tracks to listen to the music. First was Unreal, in the Depths of Rrajigar mines, when SharedDig began to play. Second was Adam Jensen's apartement in DX:HR. I'd say Halo:CE is an honorable mention also.
@@wentworthmiller1890 Shared Dig was and is my favorite Unreal soundtrack.
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 Right on mate! 25 years later, it still gives me goosebumps!
Good stuff, subbed!
I don't know if it'd fit this series, but I'd love to know more about the mind(s) behind the Unreal engine
Up to this point in the series, John Carmack was considered basically an unparalleled genius in his work, being leagues above and beyond any competition. But now Epic emerges and takes that from him
Would love to find out more about the team or Tim Sweeney
Might just be the way that Sweeney developed it that allowed others to make such impressive looking things?
There's a great interview with Tim Sweeney here if you're interested: www.gamedeveloper.com/design/from-the-past-to-the-future-tim-sweeney-talks
It's where I pulled some of my quotes, including this gem that didn't make the video:
"When I saw Wolfenstein for the first time, that was truly shocking. I'd never envisioned that you could do 3D in a computer game… it was this 3D game with real-time texture mapping; you know, real-time bitmaps scaled up and displayed in 3D on the screen. It never occurred to me that you could actually write code to do that. It was just another lack of foresight there. But seeing that for the first time, I was like, "Wow, I'm totally not worthy. I need to get out of programming now, because I'm never going to be able to compete with this." So they just basically demoralized me into becoming a manager for a few years."
Dang, that is a tasty source!
@@TalkingSkullGames Oh crap. I'm glad that Tim bounced back - we'd never have Unreal or Unreal Tournament.
John Carmack hasn't somehow got stupider or something, it just happens to be that Epic succeeded in the game engine licensing arena, while JC got bored at id and left to pursue hobbies like rocket science and VR and Artificial Intelligence
Thanks for covering a game that inspired me so much! I really dig your classic FPS series, thank you for making it!
One bit of hopefully constructive criticism I'd like to give you is that your voice sound a bit unnatural.
Maybe try to relax that a little bit? :)
Maybe you think that your voice sounds bad or childish naturally, but you know - everybody has that when they start listening to their own voice recorded. Our voices are fine, it's just that we hear ourselves way more "bassy" from the "inside" and then when we hear what a microphone picks up we're shocked and embarrassed. But if you do it for a while both of these sounds blend into one and you start to like your own voice, and no longer think it's so thin and puny. I think recording with your voice played back through headphones and playing with it is a good way of shaking off that feeling and becoming comfortable with your own voice, no matter how it sounds.
Of course everyone's voice is different and some people have lower voices than others, but it's not that only the "radio" people can be pleasant to listen to. Don't be afraid to be more natural!
Hopefully that doesn't sound condescending, I'm just trying to share some experience hoping it'll be useful :)
Take care!
Love the video. The narrator sounds like drummer from the expanse with major vocal fry but it is so nice to see my favourite game be reviewed by someone on the interwebs
I grew up with the Marathon series. It was my gateway FPS so to speak. Doom and Quake had amazing controls but the zombies and drab colours didn't appeal to me. Unreal was the first FPS since Marathon that made me really excited. It was beautiful, vibrant and atmospheric. It had aliens, great music and secondary firing modes.
Well… that wasn't entirely true. There was another game around the same time that I was also looking forward to: Duality by Double Aught (you know, the people who made Marathon Infinity). I was still a teenager with a weekly allowance, so in the end I decided not to buy Unreal and wait for Duality instead. The deciding factor was that the Mac version of Unreal did not ship with a map editor while screenshots of Duality's editor Sandbox showed a Mac OS desktop.
Duality was never released and I didn't play Unreal in full until last summer (Unreal Gold through Lutris on Linux). It still holds up incredibly well. It's still beautiful, vibrant and atmospheric. I do feel that many of its maps don't really hold up from a gameplay perspective though. Return to Na Pali was a massive improvement in that regard. The super-tanky enemies that you tend to fight one-on-one got monotonous really fast and the inventory system felt clunky to use.
I haven't liked these inventory systems at all, but they're in almost all of these old shooters. And for my money, Quake episodes 1 through 3 had the best level/encounter design in the genre from an action perspective. It's the one thing Unreal doesn't excel at.
And RIP Duality.
Thank you for sharing!
"Goldeneye set the standard for 3D interactive environments at the time" 🤣😂 (It didn't)
I think duke 3d and half life really set that
I should give that game a try.
Heck yeah!
@@TalkingSkullGames it didn't surprise me in the slightst that the unreal engine became what it is today :) this was the first game 9i had to upgrade a computer that had a 3d graphics card already to play
@@betasequence4885 That's saying something, because games weren't even expecting 3D graphics cards until 1997.
@@TalkingSkullGames My friends were a bit into our games back then :) my neighbor at the time still rubs it in sometimes that his computer had a maths co-processor and could play doom before I could.
I owned this game for years w out giving it a shot. Most my friends are console players and dont really play fps. Once I started playing bots and realized there was a second function for weapons I realized how amazing this game really is. The maps are fun and unique as well. Its a shame Fortnight stole the thunder from this game. Out w the old in w the new I guess.... but maybe somehow Epic can incorporate the 2 amazing franchises.
They've technically got a new Unreal Tournament in the works, but it's in very early development and who knows if it'll ever be worked on.
Oh my god... This skull is TALKING!!!
Unreal 1998 touches elements that belong to classic RPG's stories like the Elder Scrolls: your character starts as a prisoner, you do not know how you ended up there and you will finish as a prisoner (not in the expansion though), you constantly read wall texts written in a mythical style ("the beast that came from the stars" from the aztec levels but you never meet any ancient monster, or it could mean that the Nalis were afraid of the Vortex Rikers arriving but the fact is that you enter several huge ships). This game is forgotten because of a "plot" whose visuals and atmosphere cannot make these things obvious.
Playing the game right now for the first time in 2 decades, and in some levels I'm getting lost at what to do more than in Hexen 2, which is impressive in the wrong way. Also most of the weapons just seem ... weak. Except for the flak cannon which is of course awesome. Maybe I just don't know how to use the others right.. until this video I didn't know that some weapons did extra headshot damage. It's still a really game though :)
BTW the Skaarj remind me of the jaguar warriors from Hexen 2.
I never realized (or maybe I plain forgot) that Unreal came out before Half-Life.
Unreal definitely took things in a different direction than just about anything else had done at the time -- you still had the corridors and mazes but now their purpose is just to provide contrast to the wide open spaces -- to make virtually breathing in that fresh air feel all the sweeter. I mean, you get at least one level where if you go off the main path you find a whole, fully explorable village.
That all said, the exploration is by far the game's strongest point and I felt the actual combat could have been a lot tighter. It's not bad gunplay by any means and I love the creativity of the weapons, but your shots don't always seem to go where you want them to, enemies might be a little too evasive on top of that, and the game never quite seems to give out enough ammo supplies to reliably handle those problems -- it ends up turning into a lot of savescumming in the mid-late game when you think that you used a few too many resources that you might need later.
I think it's a case of designers trying to have their cake and eat it too -- creating systems and enemy designs that can potentially allow any encounter to put pressure on the player and become a desperate fight for survival, but also trying to create a tight resource-management game at the same time -- when ultimately, those two styles of design aren't really very compatible (unless you feed one into the other, in the style of modern Doom).
And funnily enough, the narration in the expansion always felt like a disconnect to me, this character I'm playing apparently despises the world they're in whereas here I am just basking in it.
It is too bad that it got taken out of stores. I came to it pretty late but I am very glad I found it in time. Hopefully abandonware sites are taking up the task.
Also had a lot of trouble getting that fan patch working properly on my system. Figured it out eventually but it's definitely the sort of thing that, depending on your system, I guess, could either be a cakewalk or a hellwalk. :D
While the atmosphere, textures and level design is way above Quake 2, I prefer Q2s gunplay and weapons waaay more. Unreal 1s fights felt very clunky and were much improved in UT.
Unreal: aka the shooter that defined the golden age of the Internet.
wish i could download it
You can. It's free now. Thanks, Epic!
@@marcdwonn9772 Where to download? I have looked everywhere.
Do i need to resort to the seas to obtain it?
Yes. It is fortunately very easy to acquire
Evolution mod is the best mod for unreal.
Unreal remake with UE5 plx
Pls don't. At this stage Epic will ruin everything they touch. They're only good for one single thing these days - tech.
Getting the copy of the game changed drastically, due to Epic's draconian and frankly extremely cowardly move to eliminate all traces of its glorious past. They don't want people to see how great the games of the past were, they don't want their Fortnite targets to suddently discover something better... Sad sad stuff. Oh well, luckily i already have all of the games in my libraries. Everyone else - aye, the high seas it is.
Halo sucks!
But I was spoiled by Unreal & UT:UT2k
something a barely see talked about is Unreal's leveldesign. I think, it just sucks .There are so many same looking places. Getting lost on a space ship or a weird temple, to me, just isn't fun at all. It's reason while despite having tried multiple times, I never finished Unreal. I just got annoyed by wandering around. Something that doesn't happen to me in any other old school FPS
Some levels can be confusing and drag for way longer than they should (looking at you Chizra Temple and ISV Kran), but everything from Spire Village to the Mothership is a perpetual masterpiece, with the Temple of Vendora being a strong highlight before that too.
Good, you will never experience the feeling of starting Bluff Eversmoking, when I get there I say "this level".
@@Danlovar I legit think Bluff Eversmoking is the best singleplayer FPS level ever created.
@@deus_nsf and the plot... what FPS do you start as a prisoner in? Have you asked yourself what it was what you did in order to end up there?
In the azteks levels (chizra, next one) who is beast from the stars that nalis fear written as if it happened a long ago? So many things not so obvious.