Late last year, the games company Epic removed their games Unreal, Unreal 2, Unreal Tournament (the 1999 game)*, Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Unreal Tournament 3 from sale, but didn't, as far as I know give a reason for doing so. This was a real pity, as some of the games are superb (though Unreal 2 is mediocre, UT 2003 is redundant because UT 2004 does just about everything UT 2003 does and does it much better, plus UT 2004 adds much more content), and UT 3 is just very inferior to UT 1999 and Ut 2004.

I was hoping that this was because Epic (or Nightdive Studios, or any other makers of remakes) were going to remake the (good) games. Not that they need remaking, of course, but remakes could potentially make their way to modern consoles, and I much prefer playing games on consoles. I know that Epic shut down the official servers, which is fair enough, as running them cost them money which they weren't getting back from the players since the games weren't run on a subscription based business model, but I'm sure that clever fans would be able to get the games running with private servers. Plus the games had clever and flexible bots to play against, so you would never be stuck hoping to find someone to play against.

It would be a shame if future potential fans couldn't legally buy these games.

Also, did Epic remove the OK but not great Unreal Championship and the fantastic Unreal Championship 2 from the XBox Marketplace? These were two games exclusive to the original XBox, though I think they are compatible with new XBox consoles too.

* There was another UT game, just called Unreal Tournament, that was in production, with an open pre-alpha build downloadable for fans, and was being made with the participation of the fans and the modding community, but then Epic seemed to abandon it (which really annoyed and disappointed a lot of fans, myself included), allegedly because of the oceans of money they were earning from their *massively* popular new game Fortnite.