#unreal tournament

LikeSpelunky, I don’t know why I started playing Unreal Tournament. I must have been about fifteen, and I remember discussing it with some of my friends at secondary school, so maybe one of them convinced me to try it out. Again like Spelunky, it’s not a kind of game I’m normally drawn to. I’ve played a few first-person shooters in my time – it was kind of hard to be a young man in the 2000s and notend up playing first-person shooters, since GoldenEyeandHalowere both so fundamental to adolescent male social interaction – but it’s always a genre I’ve enjoyed with friends in the same room, rather than as a solo pursuit. (To this day, I think the closest I’ve ever come to playing and completing a solo FPS is with the Mass Effect games, which are party RPGs clad in a very thin FPS veneer.)

UT, though, I played all by myself, and not even against strangers on the Internet. I have never once entered a UTmatch against another human being. I played UTexclusively against robots.

This is not the point of deathmatch-type games. The bots are training dummies: they’re only there for you to practise your skills against. Oh, they run around and shoot and display human-like tactics – falling back if they’re injured, trying to sneak up on you from a blind angle – but they’re not meant to provide a full and satisfying experience any more than one of those machines that fires tennis balls out of a cannon is meant to give you a good tennis match. You’re supposed to learn how to play the game by fighting through a series of botmatches, and then head online in search of a real challenge. I simply decided I was having quite enough fun with part one, thankyou, and wasn’t really interested in part two.

Now, the bots in UTwere not ‘characters’ in any meaningful sense. This was before Overwatch, before even Team Fortress 2. They had names, and distinct (although similar) appearances, and that was pretty much it. But as I played against them over multiple matches, they started to take on personalities. Malakai was a coward; Dessloch was a thug. Alys was a worthy foe. I had a lot of respect for Alys. I tended to play team games, rather than free-for-alls, and I’d be pleased or annoyed if certain bots were assigned to my team: Christ, I have to tote Kosak around for this entire match? He sucks!

(As it turns out, this wasn’t completely due to overimagination on my part. UTis still admired today for having exceptionally good bot AI for the time, and I discovered much later that the bots weren’t actually interchangeable. There was one guy, Loque, who I particularly feared and hated for his tendency to disrupt my winning streaks: I’d have killed ten Blue Team bots in a row without taking a scratch, and then suddenly bam, headshot from nowhere and of course it would be Loque. I recently learned from this chart that Loque was the only bot in the game with an Accuracy stat of 100, so in fact the bastard genuinely was responsible for a disproportionate number of my deaths and I wasn’t just imagining it.)

Feeding into all this unnecessary and largely unsupported headcanon was the game’s own setting, in which players were contestants in a dystopian future’s wildly popular arena bloodsport. Each map came with a cute little description of how this particular rusting facility had been bought by Liandri Corporation and repurposed for the Tournament; an announcer with a deep movie-trailer voice would rumble out approving comments if a player was doing particularly well (‘MULTI KILL!’). Match scores were displayed on electronic leaderboards during the matches themselves, so if you were on your A-game you could glance up at a wall mid-firefight and see yourself at the top of the list. I’m not sure if the game ever tried to rationalise the fact that death was so temporary as to be laughable: you could literally be blown to pieces by high explosives and you’d reappear elsewhere in the arena five seconds later, unscathed. You could kill the same opponent twenty times in a five-minute match. Future science is a wonderful thing. But all these trappings gave a potentially grim and savage game – sixteen maniacs shooting each other in a disused laboratory – a preposterous, camp bombast, a kind of heavy-metal psychedelia of blood and flame and skulls set to a pumping rock soundtrack. I could only make sense of it by recasting the whole thing as a WWF set-up: steroid-swollen gladiators and gladiatrixes, strapped into a mixture of combat fatigues and bondage gear, swigging energy drinks in the dressing room and cracking stupid jokes before all barrelling out together into the glare of the spotlights and the roar of the crowd. Of course no-one was going to die.Look, I ‘killed’ Arachne sixteen times in last night’s match and now she’s over there giving me the middle finger. The death stuff’s just for the cameras.

I named my player avatar Wraith, after a minor character I was fond of in Wolverine canon, and because I couldn’t exactly step in there with a name like Matt. The chunky pistol you started each match with, the Enforcer, could be doubled up: if you found another one lying around, you could wield one in each hand, because it was that kind of game. I loved the dual Enforcers, and regarded them as my signature weapons, which is the kind of thing that feels absolutely tremendous when you’re fifteen. Online, this would only have got me murdered by better players with the sense to use better gear. Against the bots – whose skill shifted up or down to match the player’s own – it was viable and fun. My favourite arena was Morpheus, three skyscrapers jutting up impossibly high, miles above the Earth’s surface, with only vestigial gravity. You could take a run-up and jump clean off one rooftop, sail across the gap in glorious slow-motion – blazing away at opponents as you flew – and land on the other side as easily as if you’d hopped over a puddle. Laurence Fishburne himself could hardly have done it with such effortless style. Then, of course, you’d get capped with a sniper rifle round by Loque, but that just served to check o’erweening hubris.

There was something of the Iliadabout it, I suppose: these larger-than-life beefcakes locked in futile but heroic combat, ‘hands spattered with gore, straining to win imperishable glory’. If you kept killing without being killed – an aristeia, basically – the announcer, like the narrator, would make sure everyone knew about it. ‘KILLING SPREE’, he would proclaim, in a voice like thunder, and then as your kleosmounted he’d go up the ranks: ‘RAMPAGE’, ‘DOMINATING’, ‘UNSTOPPABLE!’, and finally, with perhaps just a trace of awe, ‘GODLIKE’. That was the peak of your glory; further than that let no man look. Once you were godlike, all you could hope was that the match would end before another in his turn took the life from you with the thrown spear or the arrow sped from the bow-string (or, more likely, the fucking GES Biorifle, which just covered you with toxic green gunge until you exploded).

I’ve never spent any serious time with a first-person shooter other than UT. Its sequel, UT2004, was too hefty a game to run well on my entry-level PC at the time. I dipped a cautious toe in the water of more ‘realistic’ shooters – a friend got me to try Counter-Strike– but next to UTit seemed beige and banal: I couldn’t instinctively grasp the difference between a BJ-600 assault rifle and a Banger Mk 5 light machine gun in the way I could when they were a plasma cannon and a rocket launcher, and I found it frustrating that getting shot killed you. (Obviously, getting shot in UTdoes kill you eventually, but you can soak up a surprising amount of punishment first.) Also, slinking in cover down a dusty desert street seemed pretty dull after being propelled in low-G through the guts of an enormous mechanical crypt while the voice of God roared UNSTOPPABLE! I experimented with TF2, which like UTis colourful and slightly ridiculous, but everyone else who played it online had evidently never done anything else in their entire lives, so I spent most of my first match dead. Overwatchstill tempts me – I’ve watched a couple of clips and felt something stir in my heart – but I suspect the same thing would happen, and I am not at a stage in my life where I want some bloke in Ohio screeching at me because I can’t use the Backflip ability properly or whatever.

What I want, honestly, is UTback. Every attempt I’ve made to get it running on my laptop has been a frustrating failure: it’s an old enough game that it requires all sorts of driver kludges to run on a modern system. I’ve downloaded this patch and undownloaded that patch and taken my graphics card out and dunked it in milk before reinserting it, and all I get is a stuttery, unplayable mess. I wish I could fix it. If, after a long day at work, I could just drop into DM-ArcaneTemple for five minutes and run around firing wildly into the air, I’d be happy. I don’t really care whether I hit anything.

I like to imagine the scene pre-match; the excitement in the commentators’ booth, the commotion in the stands. Have you heard? Supposedly Wraith is back! They brought him out of retirement for a special season! Wait, is he the guy who got like two hundred kills on Codex one time? I thought he was dead!Like, really dead! And there I’d be in the dressing room, strapping the Enforcer to my thigh, surrounded by the mingled glee and disbelief of the other old lags. Hey Wraith, sneers Dessloch, you got any better at dodging bullets since last time? I adjust my shades. I don’t know, boy. You got any better at firing ‘em?

The gate cranks up; the lights and the shouting flood back in. We all rush out to die, and the loser buys the beers.