Developer: Epic Games
Release Date: November 22, 1999
Source Code Release Date: Not released

Continuing our tour of why 1999 was the best year ever for gaming, we now have Unreal Tournament on Apple Silicon. This is the original 1999 version, not the sequels and not the attempted-but-abandoned 2014 effort, this is the game that went head-to-head with Quake III: Arena from an era when the multiplayer-only FPS was still a novel concept.

Similar to the Daikatana situation, Epic has not released the source code for this game (which uses what we'd now probably retronym Unreal Engine 1) but a group of individuals online entered into an agreement with them to take over maintenance and future development. They've been releasing new builds for a few years now and now the game runs natively on Apple Silicon.

So break out the Mountain Dew and party like it's 1999 again. For extra fun fire up Quake III: Arena as well and experience a rivalry that continues between old fart gamers to this very day.

NOTE: The build of 469d below has been updated to address an issue with macOS Sonoma 14.4. In addition, the team added a preview version of their new Apple Metal renderer. For more information, see the installation instructions below.