Fan group makes Unreal Tournament 2004 available to play for free and in 4K, with Epic’s permission

Unreal Tournament 2004 has been resurrected and made available to play for free, thanks to a fan group.

As previously announced late last year, the OldUnreal group was given permission by Epic Games to make Unreal Tournament 2004 available to download for free.

Now the group has made the game available (as spotted by PC Gamer) and also released a new patch – its first “in over 20 years” – which allows the game to run on modern PCs, with numerous optimisations and bug fixes.

Players looking to play the game can access the OldUnreal site, where Windows users can download an auto-installing .exe file.

Running the .exe file starts an install process which downloads an original game disc image from the group’s own file servers, then extracts the disc image, installs the game and automatically applies its latest patch to it.

This patch allows the game to run on modern PCs and adds new features, such as widescreen improvements and the option to play in resolutions up to 4K.

Linux and macOS users can also play the game, but they have to download the installers from the OldUnreal Github page and apply the patch manually.

This is just the latest game OldUnreal has made available to play for free with Epic Games’ permission – it also has similar auto-installers for Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition.

The group will now continue to work on future patches to fix bugs – both those that were present in the original game, and those newly created by the act of making the game work on modern PCs.

“Obviously, there is lots of work still to be done, but we had to start somewhere,” a statement reads. “Some of you have noticed bugs in the patch preview. Some are side-effects of playing at much higher frame rates than were common in 2004, others are legacy bugs from the final official version that went unnoticed back then.

“Finally, there are quite a few regression bugs. This is unfortunate but inevitable given the scope of this update – besides the visible changes, we had to do significant work just to get the game to compile and run on modern systems. Rest assured that the most visible and gameplay-impacting bugs will be fixed promptly (or have already been fixed internally).”