UT2004 Lives Again: OldUnreal Official Installer Brings Classic Shooter To Windows 11

Nerds of a certain vintage get real wistful about Unreal Tournament '99, and rightfully so, but many will argue that it's the later Unreal Engine 2-based games that truly defined Unreal Tournament's identity. Unreal Tournament 2003 and the follow-up Unreal Tournament 2004 were among the first games to actively embrace the formalized concept of eSports, and the entire experience was presented like a traditional ball sports event. If you're feeling wistful from us just mentioning it, then why not load it up and play?

That's kind of a pain if you're trying to launch the game from an old install or even install the classic title from original media. Don't bother with all that. Instead, head to OldUnreal and grab the new installer package. Just released this weekend, the OldUnreal UT2004 installer is fully sanctioned by Epic Games; it's as official as it gets, considering Epic no longer sells the title anywhere.


The installer will download the original Unreal Tournament 2004 Editor's Choice Edition install image (2.7GB), get the game all set up, and then apply a fan patch that fixes up a few bugs that broke it on modern machines. It's the first patch for the game in 20 years, and it was a massive effort, including a whole new SDL backend for Linux and macOS, and even a new DirectX 9 renderer.

The result is a fully-playable, fully-patched, and fully online-capable release of what is arguably one of the most important arena shooters of all time. Unreal Tournament 2003 was brilliant, but it was also pretty uneven, with awkward menus and somewhat bare-bones content. Unreal Tournament 2004 takes that experience, sands off the rough edges, and then expands the content so that it has dozens of maps, playable characters, and numerous new game modes and weapons.


Among those is the vehicle-based Onslaught, a favorite of mine. In this mode, up to 32 players can participate in a "push points" game mode where players have to capture linked nodes to build a path to the enemy's base before they can destroy it. Besides the usual UT2004 weapons and powerups, there are a wide variety of vehicles and anti-vehicle weapons players can deploy, ranging from the rapid Manta hovercraft to the deadly Goliath tank.


If you're an old fart like me and you want to revisit Unreal Tournament 2004, or if you're a young whippersnapper and you want to try the game that arguably perfected the arena shooter, head over to OldUnreal to grab the installer. It's a little awkward as it's a bare .exe file; you might have to fight your browser or anti-virus to get it to download. We can confirm it's legit, though. Just run the executable, agree to the license agreement, and after a few minutes you'll have the game ready to go. We'll see you in Deck17.