Unreal is a first-person shooter video game developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and published by GT Interactive for Microsoft Windows in May 1998.

The ship crash-lands on the lip of a canyon on the planet Na Pali, home of the Nali, a primitive tribal race of four-armed humanoids.

Skaarj troops board the downed Vortex Rikers and kill the remaining survivors, except for Prisoner 849, who manages to find a weapon and escape from the ship.

The planet Na Pali is rich in "Tarydium", a mineral that is found as light blue crystals, possessing a high energy yield and are the reason the Skaarj have invaded.

Throughout the game, the player stumbles upon the remains of other humans, often with electronic journals that detail their last days and hint toward the cause of their demise.

The player never meets another live human, aside from a wounded crew member on the bridge of the prison ship, who gasps and dies immediately.

The mothership proves to be a vast labyrinth, but Prisoner 849 manages to find and destroy the ship's reactor, whilst fighting their way through hordes of Skaarj.

Although the prisoner survives the horrors of Na Pali, their escape pod is left to drift in space, with only a slim hope of being found.

The expansion, Return to Na Pali, developed by Legend Entertainment, picks up not long after Unreal's ending; Prisoner 849 is found by a human warship, the UMS Bodega Bay.

The prisoner listens to a recently recorded and archived conversation between the Bodega Bay and a nearby space station, the UMS Starlight, exposing the military's treachery.

Once again, Prisoner 849 is forced to traverse a series of alien facilities and Nali temples, in an attempt to locate another way off the planet.

[8]While the team still had only the outdoor terrain and the dragon in place, Intel invited Epic MegaGames to demonstrate Unreal to them.

Mark Rein revealed that while a port for the standalone Nintendo 64 was possible, the limited storage space of the cartridge format would have necessitated heavy compromises to the details on the monsters and the number of unique textures.

[12] Since Unreal came packaged with its own scripting language called UnrealScript, it soon developed a large community on the Internet which was able to add new modifications, or mods, in order to change or enhance gameplay.

It was, in fact, disabled in the Direct3D renderer by default (but could be re-enabled in the Unreal.ini file) due to performance and quality issues caused by the driver, while it was present even on hardware many times more powerful than the original S3 Savage3D and 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics.

Along with the advanced software 3D renderer, Unreal was built to take advantage of the 3Dfx Glide API, which emerged as the dominant interface towards the end of the game's development.

When Unreal was finally released, Microsoft's Direct3D API was growing rapidly in popularity and Epic was fairly quick to develop a renderer for their game engine.

Epic had been using this technology for other games such as Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall: 2097, which allowed relatively rich music to be stored in files usually smaller than one megabyte.

The Unreal soundtrack was written by MOD music authors Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos with a few selected tracks by Dan Gardopée and Andrew Sega (Straylight Productions).

Westlake Interactive, the company responsible for the port, claimed that previous patches were produced voluntarily in their free time, beyond their contractual obligations.

[25] Two novels titled Hard Crash and Prophet's Power were published, expanding on the premise and story first introduced in Unreal.

Prophet's Power, numbered as the second book in the series, is actually a prequel to the first, Hard Crash, thus it is harder for readers to understand what happened in the story.

A book called Escape to Na Pali: A Journey to the Unreal was published on June 23, 2014,[26] written by Kaitlin Tremblay and Alan Williamson.

[27][28] In the United States, Unreal debuted in third place on PC Data's computer game sales chart for the week ending May 23, 1998, at an average retail price (ARP) of $50.

[34] Unreal ultimately held at #2 behind StarCraft on the monthly chart for June as a whole,[35] and became the United States' 15th-best-selling computer game of 1998's first half.

[37][38][39] It continued its streak at second place for July overall,[40] and totaled sales in excess of 120,000 copies in the United States by the end of that month, according to PC Data.

[41] In early August, GT Interactive reported that global sales of Unreal had topped 500,000 copies, which contributed to growth at the publisher.