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Trivia / Unreal Tournament III

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  • Accidental Downer Ending: The game finished with a Bolivian Army Ending where Reaper, having lost his entire team (with his sister dying on his hands), is surrounded by Necris Phayder soldiers ready to gun him down, with him being ready to fight for his life. The game was released in 2007, and its Expansion Pack was composed solely of an extra bunch of maps, neither of which solve anything in the SP mode. The next game in the series was a failed Continuity Reboot. And in December 2022, the entire series got delisted from all stores.
  • Ascended Fanfic: Unreal Tournament III: Black Edition (a.k.a. UT3 + Titan Pack) has the Greed mode, which started as a gametype mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. Needless to say, its creator was hired by Epic Games.
  • Christmas Rushed: Due to pressure from publisher Midway Games, the game was released at the tail end of 2007 before many of its most annoying bugs would be fixed.
  • Creator Killer: While the game initially sold well, it quickly dropped off the sales charts thanks to the releases of Bioshock and Epic's own Gears of War. Midway Games, who published the game in a last-ditch effort to prevent financial collapse, saw little profit from sales, effectively marking the point of no return for Midway. Not too surprisingly, the company filed for bankruptcy two years later.
    • Subverted for Epic themselves, who made some nice profit by licensing their engine (and upgrading it) and upon the release of Fortnite, became a publisher.
  • Dummied Out:
    • There are mentions in the game's code for non-released maps DM-Hardcore and DM-Revenant. For a while, these "maps" appeared in the rotation lists for servers and picking them up would lead servers to crash.
    • There's mission code and briefing and in-game dialog sound files for the then-unreleased maps WAR-ColdHarbor and CTF-SearchLight, which implies that these two maps were meant to be released as early as the retail version.
  • Executive Meddling: The pressure from Midway Games in order to get the game released (as Epic just finished development on Gears of War) prompted the game to be Christmas Rushed, with the result being an Obvious Beta passing as a game. It wouldn't be until the Black Edition that most of its problems would be solved and many of the bugs present at launch would be fixed.
  • Franchise Killer: The Unreal series wouldn't see another release for many years due to the low reception for this game.
  • Genre-Killer: The reception and sales of this game, along with the tendency favoring cover-based games and the apparition of several free arcade FPS, were the last straw for commercial fast-paced shooters.
  • Hey, It's That Sound!: Many sounds from the previous games are reused/remastered here:
    • Lifted from Unreal are the Vortex Rikers voice-overs for DM-Morbias and CTF-Morbid, and several of the monsters' roars such as the one of the Slith for WAR-Hostile.
    • Lifted from Unreal Tournament are most of the weapon and item sounds.
    • Lifted from Unreal Tournament 2004 is the Redeemer missile flight and most of the vehicles' sounds.
  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: After December 2022, this game along with other games in the Unreal series were pulled from Steam and GOG. This left the Playstation 3 and Xbox ports as the only legal means of obtaining the game.
  • The Other Darrin:
  • Promoted Fanboy: Shares a page with the rest of Epic Games.
  • Refitted for Sequel: The whole franchise has its own page.
  • Vaporware:
    • The Linux and Mac ports. Since it's release date, Epic Games stated time and time again that they had contracted Ryan "Icculus" Gordon (who created or at least took a part in the ports for these platforms of many other games, including past Unreal installments) to create the Linux and Mac ports of the game. Screenshots showed up, there were messages about the development, but it wasn't until December 2010 that it was confirmed that those ports will never happen. Couple this with Epic giving lower priority to a PC game (they were more involved in the next Gears of War games and Bulletstorm) and we have a sad cocktail.
    • After delisting the entire series from all digital storefronts in late 2022, Epic announced a free re-release of III under the name Unreal Tournament 3X. The company then remained silent for months before quietly removing all references to the re-release in June 2023.
  • What Could Have Been: The whole franchise has its own page.
  • Working Title: Unreal Tournament 2007 (there was a trailer which had a logo with this entry) and Envy.


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