Unreal

Unreal is a single-player first-person shooter computer game which was published on Memorial Day 1998 by Epic Games. It was powered by the Unreal engine which had been in development for over three years before the game was released.

Premise

In the original title you take the part of a criminal aboard a prison transport spacecraft which has crash-landed on the planet Na Pali. The natives of this planet have been subjugated by a collection or alliance of alien races, primarily the Skaarj. Your primary goal is to locate and destroy the alien mothership and escape the planet.

Competition with Quake Series

The Unreal game engine was seen as a major rival to id Software's Quake engine, and the Unreal game itself was considered to be technically superior to the Quake and Quake II titles which were out on the market at the same time. Since Unreal came packaged with its own scripting language called UnrealScript, it soon developed a large community on the Internet which was able to add new modifications (also called mods) in order to change or enhance gameplay. This feature greatly added to the overall longevity of the product and provided an incentive for new development.