Game:

Unreal (1998)

Duration: 10:18

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Unreal is a first-person shooter video game developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and published by GT Interactive in May 1998.

The player takes on the part of Prisoner 849, aboard the prison spacecraft Vortex Rikers. During transport to a moon-based prison, the ship is pulled to an uncharted planet before reaching its destination. The ship crash-lands on the lip of a canyon on the planet Na Pali, home of the Nali, a primitive tribal race of four-armed humanoids. The Nali and their planet have been subjugated by the Skaarj, a race of brutish yet technologically advanced reptilian humanoids. Skaarj troops board the downed Vortex Rikers and kill the remaining survivors, except for Prisoner 849, who manages to find a weapon and escape from the ship.

The planet Na Pali is rich in "Tarydium", a mineral that is found as light blue crystals, which possesses a high energy yield and utility that is the reason the Skaarj have invaded. The ship has crashed near one of the many Tarydium mines and processing facilities that the Skaarj have built. Prisoner 849 travels through the mines, meeting Nali slaves and eventually entering the ruins of Nali temples, villages and cities, where the extent of the Nalis' suffering and exploitation are made clear.

Throughout the game the player stumbles across the remains of other humans, often with electronic journals that detail their last days and hint at the cause of their demise. Usually the tales are of desperate struggles to hide from the Skaarj or other bloodthirsty inhabitants of the planet. The player never meets another live human aside from a wounded crew member on the bridge of the prison ship who gasps and dies immediately. Prisoner 849 is likely the only human alive on the planet Na Pali throughout the game.



The Unreal game engine was seen as a major rival to id Software's id Tech 2 engine, and the Unreal game itself was considered to be technically superior to Quake II, which was out on the market at the same time (between December 1997 and May 1998). Originally, Unreal was going to be a Quake-style shooter—earlier screens showed a large status bar and centered weapons, similar to Doom and Quake.

The Unreal engine brought a host of graphical improvements, including colored lighting. Although Unreal is not the first major release with colored lighting (see Quake II), it is the first to have a software renderer as feature rich as the hardware renderers of the time, including colored lighting and even a limited form of texture filtering referred to by Tim Sweeney as an ordered "texture coordinate space" dither. Early pre-release versions of Unreal were based entirely on software rendering

As development progressed, various levels were cut from development. A few of these levels reappeared in the Return to Na Pali expansion pack. A number of enemies from early versions are present in the released software, but with variations and improvements to their look. One monster that didn't make the cut was a dragon. One of the weapons shown in early screenshots was the "Quadshot"—a four-barreled shotgun. The model remains in-game, while there is no code for the weapon to function (several player-made mods bring the weapon back in the game). Another weapon shown was a different pistol, however this may have just been an early version of the Automag. At one point the rifle could fire three shots at once, which is wrongly stated as the alternate fire in the Unreal manual that comes with the Unreal Anthology.

While many game companies went from FM synthesis or General MIDI in the early 1990s to CD audio and pre-rendered audio, many of the Epic games used the less common system of module music, composed with a tracker, which used stored PCM sound samples of musical instruments sequenced together to produce music. Naturally, this technology allowed easy implementation of dynamic music for mood changes in Unreal. The Unreal soundtrack was written by MOD music authors Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos with a few selected tracks by Dan Gardopée and Andrew Sega. Unreal‍ '​s music engine also supports CD audio tracks.

Source: Wikipedia

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