Monday Memory: Unreal Tournament

It's not an ancient memory, but it's a strong one. When it comes to the realm of first person shooters (FPS) there was nothing that could touch it at the time. Unreal Tournament was launched at the end of the Quake/Half-Life era and appealed to the e-sport combat crowd. It was a straight-up competitive shooter, and didn't require a big backstory: You played the role of a gladiator competing for glory in an arena, and your weapons were guns of all types.

The game had three things going for it. First, it was fast. As soon as you wanted to shoot, you shot. As soon as you saw the enemy, you could shoot. When you wanted to move, you moved. When you clicked to jump, you jumped. It rewarded skill and rapid response to events, competitive matches in confined spaces could be blindingly fast. You were limited only by the latency of your connection.

There were a number of "common" maps that shipped with the game and could be played in solo mode, with different maps supporting different game types - capture the flag, zone control, last man standing, etc. The most famous map in UT was "Face" - two towers on either end of an asteroid floating in space that faced each other. Anyone who played on a public server for any length of time memorized all of the spawn points for the map, and probably took their turn being a jerk and zooming in on the spawn points with a sniper rifle waiting for a "headshot."

The second great thing about UT was aside from different types of guns and rocket launchers you were also armed with a translocater that could teleport you short distances. You shot it once and a disc flew out, you click the alternate firing button and you teleported yourself to where the disc went. If someone happened to be standing where the disc landed they were turned into meaty giblets. This created the word "gibbed" or "insta-gib." It was also possible to climb extra high by shooting the translocater up in the air, teleporting, and shooting it again before you fell to shoot it even higher. Some practice was required with use because you kept your deceleration when you teleported, and you could end up splatting youself after too much time spent teleporting in mid-air.

Third, and the best part of the game, was playing custom maps. Anyone who owned a copy of the game also owned all the tools required to make their own custom maps, and if you ran a server you could upload them for everyone to share and compete on. Some of the maps were giant bedrooms that mouse-size combatants ran around in, endless mazes of space tubes, and dark cities at night with dozens of good spots to make a sniper nest and wait for targets to show themselves.

It could be frustrating sometimes, but once you got good at the game and you were winning more than you were gibbed, it was a great stress reliever. You got to recognize people who were good or fun to team with, and people formed clans to group with, but each game was a fresh reset, and a rampage to bloody victory. Some people played it with serious obsession and even got Unreal tattoos and shared pics on the net. I felt bad for them when UT2 was released and proved to be a horrible failure, and the franchise was nearly killed.