After bringing Unreal Gold and the original Unreal Tournament to archive.org, fans of the classic multiplayer shooters have brought Unreal Tournament 2004 back to life and made it entirely free to download. OldUnreal, a community support group that has been going for years, has always been driven to keep Epic Games' old Unreal Tournament games alive. Epic Games even granted permission for Unreal Tournament 2004 to be made free, supporting OldUnreal in its latest endeavours.
As per PC Gamer, the only thing that this version of Unreal Tournament 2004 might cost you is time. You can download the installer from the OldUnreal site here, but once you've packaged the full game onto your PC you'll have to head over to GitHub to get the community patch, which lets the game run properly on modern operating systems, including Mac and Linux.
"Please note that this is the first public patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 in over 20 years," writes project manager Stijn-volckaert on GitHub. "We have implemented numerous fixes and improvements, written a new SDL backend for Linux and macOS, and even a new renderer. We have also migrated the entire codebase to modern build systems. Some new bugs may have slipped in!"
So, if you want to get into some nostalgic shooting this weekend, now you can, thanks to the work of some incredibly dedicated fans.