it back on a collision course with the Bodega Bay. The large ship is disabled by the ensuing blast, and Prisoner 849 escapes into space. Hopefully he made it to earth. Development Unreal was jointly developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and mostly funded with the proceeds from Epic Pinball, Epic's best selling shareware game. In the February 1997 issue of Next Generation, lead designer James Schmalz recalled how it started: While the team still had only the outdoor terrain and the dragon in place, Intel invited Epic MegaGames to demonstrate Unreal to them. Following the demonstration, Intel told them about their upcoming MMX instruction set. Sweeney was immediately excited by the possibilities MMX presented, and put together a working MMX version of the rendering code before Epic had even received a chip with MMX. Originally, Unreal was going to feature a large status bar and centered weapons, similar to Doom and Quake. As development progressed, various levels were cut from development. A few of these levels reappeared in the Return to Na Pali expansion pack. A number of enemies from early versions are present in the released software, but with variations and improvements to their look. One monster that didn't make the cut was a dragon. One of the weapons shown in early screenshots was the "Quadshot" - a four-barreled shotgun; the model remains in-game, while there is no code for the weapon to function (several user-made modifications bring the weapon back in the game). Another weapon shown was a different pistol, however this may have just been an early version of the Automag. At one point, the rifle could fire three shots at once, which is wrongly stated as the alternate fire in the Unreal manual that comes with Unreal Anthology. Initially the game's player character was to be female, but as the number of games with female playable characters increased, the team decided to allow the player to select from a male character and a female character. In late 1996 GT Interactive secured exclusive global publishing rights to Unreal. With the game still in development, Epic MegaGames started work on a port for the Nintendo 64DD. Mark Rein stated in an interview that "We still have to get Nintendo's approval on everything, but we're working on it. We're already coding the engine. ... we'll have to reduce the dimensions of the textures, so they'll be scaled