I still get the urge to play the original UT. It is weird that instinctively that era of games feels mere years ago but it is more like 2 decades. Perhaps it’s that the leap from ZZT to UT seems far more vast than UT to Fortnite.
People should pay more attention to Tim Sweeney. He appears to have a much better grasp on how to run a tech company using an open platform than the more well known Silicon Valley CEOs. The Unreal Engine may not be explicitly open source as in Linux, but it’s all viewable and the licensing terms are reasonable.
Community is still around in fact the whole UT (from 99 to 4) fanbase hangs around a couple of Discords. Mind you, we're talking about 200 people globally probably so, it's tiny but big enough to play.
I emailed Mark Rein in high school about getting into 3D programming. He was the president of Epic Games back then and emailed me back.
I stopped playing when I went to college. What happened to the UT fan base? Is there an article about it? Genuinely curious.