Trivia / Unreal

• All There in the Manual: As with many first person shooters of the era, a prologue to the game is featured in the manual. In this blurb, the player is helpless in their cell as the Vortex Rikers goes down, even arguing with one of the guards to let them out, before being knocked unconscious and injured, leading to their state of low health at the beginning of the game.
• Approval of God:
  • The OldUnreal community patches are made with Epic Games's knowledge and blessing.
  • Cliff Bleszinski loved the 3dsMax recreation of NyLeve's Falls.
  • Bleszinski also named the following maps as "Ownage": DmSiberia, DM-StrictlyDiesel, DMDespair, DMSanctum and DmVeltor. All of their authors have contributed at least one map for the next game.^note Ebolt, creator of Siberia, contributed DM-Bishop and DM-Grit-TOURNEY for the Bonus Pack 4 and RA-Ebolt for the Rocket Arena: UT ascended mod (which would later be ported to the Dreamcast version of Tournament as standalone arenas); Willhaven contributed DOM-WolfsBay for the Bonus Pack 4 and was a key level designer for Unreal Tournament 2004, creating half of the stock Assault levels (Convoy, FallenCity and Junkyard) as well as CTF-AbsoluteZero and ONS-Urban; VerMoorD went on to work with Legend Entertainment in the Return to Na Pali Expansion Pack with the Deathmatch levels Athena and Hazard; and Clawfist contributed with lots of official maps for the Tournament games, both officially and unofficially, all the way to Unreal Tournament 4.
• Development Gag: The "Mon-Ton Dew" message in the lake corpse in the "Escape from Na Pali" level of Return to Na Pali is a reference to Epic's "Mountain Dew mountain", referenced several times on interviews, and whose only proof of existence is a photo former Epic Games's programmer Erik de Neve once uploaded into one of the comments of an article in the site Rock Paper Shotgun about Unreal's 20-year anniversary.
• Dummied Out: If you know how to use the Level Editor, you will notice that there's a lot of content which didn't made the cut for the final game.
  • The QuadShot, for instance, was supposed to be a quad-barrel pump shotgun with the ability to load all four barrels before discharging. It was probably decided to cut it for game balancing reasons - as becomes evident if you install a Game Mod that restores it, four shotgun barrels worth of hitscan pellets are a guaranteed One-Hit Kill against anything short of bosses. It got replaced with the less unbalanced and more setting-friendly Flak Cannon, but the OldUnreal patch v227a restored it.
  • There are a couple monsters who appear nowhere in the finished game but can still be placed with the level editor or spawned with the console. All of the monsters are fully functional, making the reason for their removal unclear.
  • There's a functional level called "The Gateway" which looks like a hub of sorts. It's unconnected to the main game and cannot be selected in Multiplayer or Botmatch modes unless renaming it. (And filling it with items and spawnpoints.)
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • There's no legal way to obtain the original Unreal without RTNP, only Unreal Gold.
  • As of the end of 2022, Epic Games has also removed Unreal Gold from digital distribution along with the rest of the Unreal series, so you can't even obtain that legally without a second-hand digital key or hunting down a 25-year old CD-ROM.
• Promoted Fanboy: Shares a page with the rest of Epic Games.
• Recycled Soundtrack: The track "Isotoxin (Unreal Mix)" by Andrew "Necros" Sega, which plays on the Outpost 3J level, had its origins as the title track for an older game called In Pursuit Of Greed. As its Unreal track name implies, it was remixed for the game, the most notorious change being the removal of its intro.
• Refitted for Sequel: The whole franchise has its own page.
• Saved from Development Hell: A patch for version 227j began development as soon as v227i was finished, at the tail end of 2012. After nearly a decade under development, it was finally released on June 23, 2022. Tellingly, its changelog is quite titanic in size.
• Staff-Created Fan Work: The map DmDespair, by Legend's own Mick Beard, didn't made the cut for Return to Na Pali, but still found its way as an officially released addon.
• Tribute to Fido: An Easter Egg in the "Bluff Eversmoking" level (with two of the tombs in the cemetery portion of the level reading "Myscha" and "Pelit"), the Credits section of the Unreal manual (where it's outright stated that the game was dedicated to "the memory of Myscha and Pelit"), and an interview at a Doom fansite reveal that the Easter Egg is related to the level designer T. Elliott "Myscha" Cannon^note Who created the original Deck 16 levels for this game and Unreal Tournament, since he dedicated both the game and his maps to both of his dead dogs.
• Troubled Production: The path to v227j was... tumultuous, to say the least. Not only bugs and imperfections kept appearing while more and more features were added and tested, but the main coordinator of the patch also underwent health problems. And the patch was meant to be released on the same day as Unreal's 24th. anniversary (May 21, 2022), but it got delayed due to more bugs appearing on the road, especially with the installer. Needless to say, the day of the release was, indeed, a huge event.
• Updated Re-release: Unreal Gold, which also included the Expansion Pack Return to Na Pali and updated the interface to UWindows, the system used by Unreal Tournament.
• What Could Have Been: The whole franchise has its own page.

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