Unreal Tournament 2004 is getting revived by OldUnreal with approval from Epic Games

Just like Epic Games did for the original Unreal Tournament, they're giving full approval to OldUnreal to revive Unreal Tournament 2004 and keep it updated.

Writing in the OldUnreal Discord, their team announced the upcoming revival of Unreal Tournament 2004. It will be available as a free download, with members of OldUnreal working to improve various parts of the game. Copied below is the original announcement from Discord:

Hi everyone! Some of you were probably wondering why we've been so quiet in the past couple of months. Today, we can finally reveal (part of) the answer: we've been working on a new side project!

With Epic's blessing and with the help of some new team members, we are bringing Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2004) back. This means that we are going to publish an installer that downloads the original disc image for UT2004, installs the game, and applies patches to it. We are also going to start publishing patches that modernize the game, make it compatible with Windows Vista or later, Linux x86-64 and aarch64 (Raspberry Pi and similar), and Mac OS 10.9 or later, fix bugs, and implement quality-of-life changes.

Yes, you read that right. UT2004 will soon be available to download once again. Free of charge.

This is a community-run effort but we’re excited to make the game easier to access and play again.

We have been working on this for quite some time now and have made enough progress to start inviting the first batch of testers. Highlights so far include:

• We now natively support modern Linux and macOS systems with 64-bit Intel and ARM/Apple CPUs,
• You can now play the game or run a server on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, albeit at a lower frame rate than on a PC!,
• The Linux and macOS distributions of the patch now include a fully functional UCC with an UnrealScript compiler (UCC make) and texture compression support,
• The Linux and macOS distributions now use SDL3 instead of SDL1,
• D3D9Drv and fullscreen support are fully functional in the Windows 64-bit client,
• We dealt our first (minor) blow to the editor goblin! We fixed several crash bugs, restored some broken functionality, and, most importantly, the editor will no longer freeze for several seconds when you click a viewport

When can we expect it? Not for a little while. A public test version is planned "within the next two months" and they have some preliminary patch notes up.

This is great. If you're not going to be doing anything with your classic games, you might as well let the community keep them alive. More companies should do this. Or, even better, just open source them - but one step at a time huh?