But I remember Unreal being unreachable for me at that time because I couldn't even dream of getting a graphics accelerator and it won't even start with out a one, or was it the sound card requirement that was the blocker?
Original Unreal had soft rendering just like Quake 1/2 and so on. Though at that point my brother and I had saved up enough beans to buy a Voodoo2.
I think it was the graphics card. I remember getting a paper route and waking up at 5am every morning to save up the money for my Voodoo card. Was absolutely mind blowing as a 13 year old.
Everything up to (and including) Unreal Tournament had software rendering. It was one of the selling points when its competitor (Quake 3) was Hardware-accelerated-only.