Unreal Redux, an in-development remake of the classic FPS Unreal, is not an official Epic Games project, but it does have the official thumbs-up from one very important person: Original Unreal designer Cliff Bleszinski, who said on X that it “looks SO COOL.”
(We don’t normally do the all-caps thing, but Cliff’s enthusiasm is contagious.)
My last words when I left Epic were “Please remaster the original Unreal” and, well, the fans are doing it.Looks SO COOL. Time for a new generation to learn that Unreal isn’t just an engine. Worked my butt off on this game.https://t.co/kMFFFy77q2October 5, 2025
“My last words when I left Epic were “Please remaster the original Unreal” and, well, the fans are doing it,” Bleszinski wrote in reaction to the new Unreal Redux autumn 2025 trailer. “Looks SO COOL. Time for a new generation to learn that Unreal isn’t just an engine. Worked my butt off on this game.”
That’s a fair point: For a lot of gamers, the word “Unreal” is invariably followed by “Tournament,” which collectively gives us the title of one of the most popular and influential multiplayer shooters of all time. But Unreal Tournament didn’t come out until a year after Unreal, which it quickly overshadowed—largely because Unreal, while an impressive technological showcase and very pretty for its time, really wasn’t a great game: Levels were too large and sparsely populated, weapons were unimpressive, and the enemies and story entirely forgettable. (Sorry, Cliff.)
Epic produced one proper Unreal sequel, which was even less great—Bleszinski, who served as executive producer on the game, said in a reply tweet that he “mismanaged it as a producer and it felt like a generic sci-fi shooter”—but the focus has otherwise been entirely on the Unreal Tournament series, which somewhat ironically served as a showcase for new iterations of the Unreal Engine all the way through Unreal Engine 4 in 2014. Plans for a new UT were abandoned, though, so Epic could focus its efforts on Fortnite and the Epic Games Store.
Watch On
Here’s the Unreal Redux trailer, in case you missed it in Cliff’s post above.
It’s been far too long for me to remember any details (and so my opinion above is based more on vibe memory than actual memories), but the Unreal Redux trailer definitely looks the part, and I’m eager to give it a try to see if my feelings about the game may have changed over these many long years—or if I’ve just been completely off-base all this time.
When that will happen is anyone’s guess: Unreal Redux has been in development for nearly a decade now and possibly longer—the first Unreal Redux teaser was posted on YouTube in 2018, but other Unreal 1 videos go back even further—and there’s still no release date. You’ll also need an unexpectedly beefy PC to actually run it: An FAQ says an Intel Core I7 4790K @ 4GHZ, 16 GB RAM, and a Nvidia GTX 970 is the minimum spec, quite a step up from the Intel Pentium CPU and 16MB RAM required by the original; it also warns that 3dfx cards may not be supported.
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