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of course all other gamers. The gauntlet had been thrown down and accepted but only by few on comers. The gaming giant id had a go with Quake at going head to head with Unreal but failed in my opinion with its lack lustre Quake Arena. Which was released only 10 days after UT. With its slow pace and poor AI Quake Arena died a death and Unreal had claimed its first scalp in the war to come.

What had sustained UT for the moment was the AI in game and the mod friendly editor. With AI from "novice" up to "godlike" the player had a wide range of customization over his "bots" or in game non player characters (npcs). The mod friendly game had created a base for itself with Unreal and now the people that had sustained Unreal easily rolled over into the UT bandwagon and hundreds of fan sites and mod communities sprung up from this new game with better graphics, faster action and a new and improved editor which continues to be updated in the new versions of the game.

In 2003 Epic released the long awaited update to UT99 with Unreal Tournament 2003! The stage was set for a massive fall from grace and that's exactly what happened. The game play was slack and ineffective, even if the graphics were next generation this was no incarnation of Unreal this was something to fob us off with until they could create something truly outstanding once more. Realising that UT2003 was a flop and needing to recover from the loss of UT2003 Epic combined the game play from UT99 and the graphics of UT2003 to create UT2004 which came out the next year to hails of genius and applause. Unreal had come home and in style!

So UT2004 made Unreal the brand it is today. With its superb graphics and high speed action and the daredevil move of including vehicles in the mix. Epic created a masterpiece and cemented its place in the history books as THE games developer of the first person shooter.

So what I hear you say? Well Unreal set the mark for Halo, Half-Life 2, Doom 3 and of course all the games that come out now, that sit there on the first person shooter rack in your local video game store.

All we have to do is look forward to Unreal Tournament 2007 to see if Epic can push back the boundaries once more!

Learn more about this author, Alex Haworth.
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