Play Unreal Tournament 3 Black for free through the weekend

By Stephany Nunneley

Anyone with a Steam account can play Unreal Tournament 3 Black free of charge starting this Thursday, May 28.

Pre-loads for the game begin today, and thanks to the previous free weekend back in March, the game claimed the number one spot on the bestseller list with simultaneous player numbers jumping by more than 2000 percent.

The game comes with the free Titan Pack and over 50 Steamworks Achievements.

Press release is posted below.

ARY, N.C. (May 26, 2009) — Epic Games, Inc. is giving players more reasons than ever to jump online and check out Unreal Tournament 3 Black. This Thursday, May 28, will commence a long weekend in which anyone can log onto Valve’s Steam digital distribution service, download Unreal Tournament 3 Black and play the game through the weekend free of charge. Pre-load for the follow-up Free Weekend begins today.

During the previous Free Weekend of Unreal Tournament 3 Black on Steam, the game claimed the number one spot on the bestseller list, and simultaneous player numbers jumped by more than 2000%.

Unreal Tournament 3 together with the free Titan Pack constitutes Unreal Tournament 3 Black. The Titan Pack is a massive bonus pack with loads of enhancements and new content including environments, the Titan mutator, the Greed and Betrayal gametypes, the Stealthbender vehicle, weapons, deployables, characters and more. Unreal Tournament 3 Black also includes over 50 Steamworks Achievements.

Players who purchased Unreal Tournament 3 at retail can enter their retail key by using the “Activate a product on Steam” feature in the Steam client, and Steam will automatically update them to Unreal Tournament 3 Black for free.

Unreal Tournament 3 Black now also includes the recently released Patch 2.1 with even more fixes and upgrades such as award progress when using custom maps and characters, mod support enhancements, various gameplay tweaks and bug fixes, and additional user interface improvements.

In addition to Epic’s internal efforts to support Unreal Tournament 3, mod authors all over the world have created new levels, characters, weapons, vehicles and total conversions for the game as part of the $1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal Contest (www.makesomethingunreal.com). Phase 3 of the competition just closed, and the judging process has begun. A few notable entries so far include:

— Improved mods from Phase 2 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=boRLoXYf1_A)
— Community Bonus Pack 3 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yoWdRlHVUw&e)
— Angels Fall First: Planetstorm (www.moddb.com/mods/angels-fall-first-planetstorm)
— Coda (www.codamod.com)
— Prometheus (www.moddb.com/mods/prometheus)
— Runestorm (www.runestorm.com)
— Snowreal (www.moddb.com/mods/snowreal)
— The Ball (www.moddb.com/mods/the-ball)
— The Haunted (www.moddb.com/mods/the-haunted)

And there’s much, much more available at www.makesomethingunreal.com/phase3.aspx.

To download Unreal Tournament 3 Black, visit http://store.steampowered.com/app/13210.