20 Years of UnrealFans
Oh how times have changed!
20 years ago I exchanged a pay cheque from my weekend job building computers to buy this domain name, unrealfans.com. The original idea was to show the world what was going on in the awesome world of Unreal Tournament and show off the community behind it all!
In those early days we did exactly that, along with the latest Unreal news from around the industry we were also lucky enough to interview and connect with a huge number of community members to find out more about what they were working on, from maps and mods. Through to the first games that came from mods. It was a great time to be part of it all.
We were treated to great games using Unreal Engine. Games like Gears of War, Bioshock, Tribes, even Unreal Tournament 2004 and Unreal Tournament 3 all came along and communities formed around them. Those communities around Unreal Tournament grew, and to a degree moved along as new UT games were released.
However, times change. By the time UT3 launched in 2017 the internet itself had seen the introduction of things like social media game streaming and lots of the changes had taken place around how we, as gamers consumed games.
The biggest change was PUBG, which introduced us to large scale the large scale Battle Royale format. The days of death matches on smaller maps seemed to be over before the launch of UT3 arrived just 8 months later.
This didn't stop Epic, they quickly released Fortnite's own Battle Royale mode as free to play with in-game purchases. This completely changed the landscape for gamers. Gone were the days of having to drop cash on a game before jumping online to play. Now everyone could get in and have fun, the gateway to entry had been lowered. We didn't need to rent servers for games, we could just click go and off we went!
Through all of this UnrealFans has been here in one form or another, some times just as an idea, without a site. Now we're back bringing you all the latest news around that little game engine, that little company Epic Games and the community of developers that use it every day.