Nostalgia always gets me when gaming. Unreal always finds its way back into my heart year after year. I remember when EPIC told the Unreal community it was shutting down the master servers, it was widespread turmoil in our little gaming community. Within a short period of time a handful of players came up with a plan to host their own master servers and keep the game alive. Unreal was saved, for the time being.

Epic put out a widespread notice that on January 24th, 2023, it would shut down master servers for the following games:

• Unreal II: The Awakening
• Unreal Tournament 2003
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Unreal Tournament 3
• Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition.

Coupled with this they have taken all of these titles off of steam and the EPIC games market.

Quickly folks are turning to alternative support to keep these games alive. Anyone remember GameSpy? Just so happens some good folks got together and are reverse engineering how their master servers where setup to create OpenSpy which I quote "OpenSpy is a multiplayer platform which aims to provide 100% compatibility with GameSpy games. These services include matchmaking (server browsing, player searching, buddy following/inviting, lobbies), account managment, game stats, NAT traversal to reduce the need for port forwarding, global game chat (prior to finding a match)." So head on over and get the help ya need to keep some of these old games alive.

The sites below have easy walkthroughs on how to get your master servers back up also.

UT3 new master servers how to - https://ut3-ultimate.com/

UT2k4 new master servers how to - https://ut2004serverlist.com/