There's a growing field that I like to call 'digital archeology': the excavation and analysis of weird artifacts that have become buried in decades-old software or only exist on archived websites. Sometimes those artifacts just rise to the surface on their own, as was the case with an image of "mold" spotted by a Fortnite player in the game's news feed.

It isn't a picture of mold, but a stock photo of "cave pearls, a kind of calcium carbonate deposit that forms in limestone caves," Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said on X in response to the question from M1das.

Sweeney says he added the texture to the first version of Unreal Engine all the way back in 1995.

"This is Unreal Engine's default texture," he said. "I imported it into Unreal Engine 1 in 1995 while I was developing on a 90 MHz Pentium. It's still there and shows up when a programmer forgets to specify a texture."

I assume I must have seen these cave pearls many times: I've played a lot of Unreal Engine games, and whoever messed up Fortnite's news feed is hardly the first developer to ever forget a texture. But I don't recognize the image. Not like the Source engine's missing texture icon, that famous fuchsia checkerboard, or its giant red "ERROR" text.

Maybe Unreal's default texture just evaded my long term memory by being so ambiguous: blobs of an organic-looking something. It obviously hasn't evaded Unreal developers, though. "This image haunts my dreams," said an ILM Immersive artist last year.

The Rogue Prince of Persia, the aptly named Prince of Persia roguelike from longtime Dead Cells steward Evil Empire, is gearing up for its Second Act update, and it's probably one of the biggest updates I've seen for any game all year. The "game content will double," Evil Empire says, and the core art style, which once rendered our titular hero as the glorious Prince of Purple, is getting an overhaul.

"We're giving The Rogue Prince of Persia a glow-up!" the developer says. The "big art upgrade" does more than de-purple the prince; environments are noticeably more detailed, and the whole world looks a bit sharper and higher-contrast. 

"The most obvious change of this update is the art direction where we've changed the color palettes. had much more detail added and just generally 'improved,'" a Steam post reads. "You'll also notice that the Prince is no longer purple - this change was made as the purple tone just didn't fit with the new direction. We'll go into more detail about why we made these changes next week, but we find that the art direction is now a much better fit with the game's genre, setting/story and the Prince of Persia series as a whole."

If you're gutted by the loss of the Prince of Purple, Evil Empire has good news: "there may or may not be skins coming in the future," per a YouTube comment. I'm down with both styles, personally, but I do agree with the fans pointing out that the new look is more recognizably Persian. 

The Second Act short list includes more biome, bosses, story content, enemies, and localization options. "This update will mark a point where we've effectively doubled the game's content from launch," Evil Empire clarifies. "All the roguelite markers are present - gameplay loop, metaprogression, builds, difficulty modifiers and more - and we're not finishing here with development continuing into 2025!" 

Our Rogue Prince of Persia review praised its slick combat at launch, but the game was crying out for updates and improvements, so it's good to see it chugging along. 

The Prince of Persia roguelike had to change its story because of the Prince of Persia Metroidvania - and was forbidden from using an iconic weapon

Have you ever thought to yourself, "Gosh, I've heard such good things about the classic 1998 shooter Unreal and sure would like to try it, but I just don't know where to get it these days?" If so, I have good news: The Internet Archive has made it free, along with the multiplayer follow-up Unreal Tournament, and it has Epic's blessing to do so.

Word of the newly-free Unreal games was first shared at the end of October on the OldUnreal Discord, but it didn't come to wider attention until the news was shared on Resetera. An Epic spokesperson subsequently confirmed that it has given the green light for the games to be hosted on the Internet Archive, telling PC Gamer, "We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org and people are free to independently link to and play these versions."

I was always more of a Quake man than an Unreal guy, but there's no denying the importance of the games. Unreal looked, well, unreal, but it was the editor bundled with the game that really locked its place in videogame history. Unreal Tournament was an even bigger deal, with dramatically improved "Internet play," as we called it at the time—an element of first-person shooters that has proved rather durable over the years.

Given all that, it's ironic that Epic's efforts to bring back UT failed so dramatically. A new game was announced with great fanfare in 2014, but despite early promise the runaway success of Fortnite convinced Epic to pull the plug.

If UT doesn't have much of a future, at least its past is well preserved. You can download and install Unreal and Unreal Tournament directly by snagging the files from the Internet Archive and then getting the patches to run it on current Windows systems from Github, all of which is detailed in full on the OldUnreal Discord. Or you can save yourself a lot of headaches by grabbing new installers from oldunreal.com—here are direct links to Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament—and letting them do the work.

I tried it, and it works: The blast of text in the DOS window that pops up during the install process was momentarily alarming, but with a few clicks (and no need to understand what "mount the game disc" means) I was off and running in Unreal Gold.

Bear in mind that Unreal and UT are very old, and so there's some unavoidable oddness at play. The default 640x480 resolution is pretty funky on 4K displays, and you will immediately notice that the mouse is inverted out of the box, which was the style at the time. It also uses the arrow keys for movement—if you want to use WASD (or whatever other Totally Normal Person system you've cooked up) you'll need to do some key remapping.

But it runs, it's free, and maybe most notably it comes at a time when game preservation efforts are running up against serious opposition from companies and organizations who are determined to stymie efforts to keep old games accessible and playable. It's not as though Epic was making any bank on them anyway—they were removed from sale along with a bunch of other old Epic games a couple years ago—so there's little here to lose, but even so I think Epic deserves props for doing something cool. Maybe it'll even inspire other game makers to follow suit.