Fell into a nostalgia hole last week. Here’s what happened:

Sometime after a boring Steam Summer Sale, I asked ChatGPT if there was a way to play old Windows games on my Mac Mini M4 Pro. That one question kicked off a whole rabbit hole. You know how it goes. One minute you’re curious, the next you’re deep in forum threads and file formats you haven’t thought about in twenty years.

That’s kind of what I love about using ChatGPT. It never shrugs or says, “eh, maybe later.” It’s just always ready. Always down to figure stuff out. I’ve gone from random ideas to working setups in a single afternoon, just because it kept saying, “Yeah, we can do that.” This time, that yes led me back to Unreal Tournament.

I had ChatGPT generate me some old-school readme.txt instructions, like the kind you’d find on a sketchy FTP site back in the Unreal Tournament days.

File: UT-README.TXT

This was one of the first games I really played during the “video card” era of PC gaming. Software rendering was dead the moment OpenGL showed up. And with the right setup, Unreal Tournament felt like the future. We weren’t lugging CRTs to LAN parties anymore. We were online. It was 3D shooter warfare over cable modems.

I’ve since learned Quake 3 can run on Mac silicon too. Adding that to the to-do list.