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Unreal is a first-person shooter computer game, published in 1998; the Unreal engine is the game engine which powered that game, and many more since including sequels to Unreal itself. Epic Games published the first-person shooter Unreal on Memorial Day 1998, having been in development by Epic and Digital Extremes for about three years.
It was seen as a major competitor to id Software's Quake series, and its technology was a little superior to the then-published Quake and Quake 2.
Since it was basically as scriptable and customizable as Quake and featured its own scripting language UnrealScript, it soon had a large community on the Internet which added new modifications to change or enhance gameplay.
In its primary version (just labeled "Unreal"), the focus lay on the single-player aspect. Epic Games' 1999 followup title Unreal Tournament, however, focused mainly on multiplayer and competed against Id's Quake III Arena. Both Unreal and Unreal Tournament had sequels released in 2002 entitled Unreal 2 and Unreal Tournament 2003. Unreal 2 was a singleplayer only game until a multiplayer expansion named eXpanded MultiPlayer, or XMP for short, was released. Later this year, Unreal Tournament 2004 is going to be released. The demo is already available for download. Unreal Tournament 2004 will run on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Since then, many other companies in the business have licensed the underlying "Unreal Engine" to speed up development by not building their own game engine from scratch, including the Star Trek adventure Deep Space Nine: The Fallen or Ion Storm's Deus Ex. Newer versions of the engine (the so called "Warfare" engine) are being used for PC games such as Running with Scissors' Postal 2, 3D Realms' Duke Nukem Forever, the U.S. Army's America's Army and Ion Storm's Deus Ex: Invisible War.
Unreal's sequel, Unreal II: The Awakening, was released in February, 2003. Unreal Tournament 2003 was released in September, 2002. Unreal Tournament 2004, using the next build of the Unreal engine has been announced for the first months of 2004.
Versions of the Unreal "Warfare" Engine are available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X. and GNU/Linux. As well as the latest gaming consoles, which include the Sony Playstation 2, Microsoft Xbox and the Nintendo Gamecube. The first version of the Unreal engine was also available for the Sega Dreamcast.