Unreal Tactics was something I had been toying around with making since the days of the first "Make Something Unreal" contest back in 2003. I had worked in Unreal Engine 2/2.5 for school, so I was fairly comfortable with it, and I began to investigate how viable the idea was. This first version never really became anything worth note. Skip ahead a couple of years to Epic's announcement of a second "Make Something Unreal" contest, I decided to resurrect the idea I started working on Unreal Tactics in spring of 2008, and over the course of the next two years put together what I still feel is a technically impressive conversion of Unreal Tournament 3 into a real time strategy and squad based tactics game. Epic seemed to agree with this sentiment as Unreal Tactics was nominated as one of only a few mods that were allowed to enter the grand finals of the contest.