If you cast your mind back to November of 2024, you may remember us telling you that the Unreal community, OldUnreal, had released a pair of installers, with Epic's blessing, to download the influential first-person shooters Unreal (more specifically, Unreal Gold) and Unreal Tournament for absolutely nothing from Archive.org.
Well, since then, it appears that yet another Unreal game, Unreal Tournament 2004, has just undergone the very same treatment (as spotted by PC Gamer), and we again have the folks at Old Unreal to thank for making this all happen.
So, if you and your friends happen to have a hankering to load up the classic arena-based shooter for some capture the flag or a simple game of deathmatch, you should now be able to do so without spending a single penny.
According to PC Gamer, the community first announced it was planning to release a new installer for the game back in December of last year, in a Discord message, which was later republished on Reddit.
As was the case for the last two games, the latest game is technically available to download directly from archive.org, but can also be grabbed using the installer on OldUnreal's website (OldUnreal doesn't have permission to host the full game download itself, hence this workaround). Once you grab the game, you will then need to head over to GitHub to grab the preview of the latest OldUnreal patch (3374), which does things like migrate "the entire codebase to modern build systems" while introducing "numerous fixes and improvements", including a new SDL backend (for Linux and macOS) and a new renderer (Windows, Linux, and macOS).
As UT project manager and computer science professor, Stijn-volckaert, notes, "this is the first public patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 in over 20 years."