Yes, the original Unreal Tournament has hit the five year mark and is still going as strong as ever with about 2000 players fighting it out online at any given moment. It was this exact same week that the original UT (please make an effort to omit the 99 suffix
) was released.
The release of UT was a bit of a gamble as it marked the first step of the Unreal series into the truly multiplayer genre and had to contend with the heavyweight that became ID Software's Quake 3 Arena. Thanks to it's visual effects that are still recognized by today's standards, it's ingenious modding system, the object-orientated approach used by uscript (internal programming language), UT is still inspiring people around the world to continue making inventive custom content.
UT is also a success story about people like Tim Sweeney and Cliff Blezinski which has further given birth to the sequels that became UT2003 & UT2004 and to a whole franchise with many games using the advancements of the current Unreal Engine.
Of course, the Unreal series would be nothing without the numerous fans out there and the strong communities such as
BeyondUnreal. Also of note, the Rock'Em Hard UT Demo community is still around after coming into existence on November the 17th 1999. Visit their site at
http://www.rockemhard.com/ .