It's hard to convey just what a significant moment it was, in 1997-98, when Quake II and Unreal came out within six months of each other. Marking Epic's entry into the graphics arms race with id Software, the two games were both utterly brilliant shooters in their own rights, but also became the names behind the engines on which a generation of games would be built.
What also made them special is that both Epic and id were developers who grew up with an understanding of the importance of shareware, free software, and putting source code into the public domain. It's why anyone can use those engines, and many later iterations of them, to create their games, free, without license or restriction.
Epic, for whatever other faults you may wish to level, is not like this, and while it should be commonplace, instead it's a rare joy to see something like the 26-year-old Unreal so freely and willingly shared. There are many publishers who are so ludicrously obsessed with maintaining a death-grip around their most ancient software that they will sue anyone who dares touch it.
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