Evarena is a Total Conversion (TC) of the video game Unreal Tournament 2004 and brings the player into the world of the popular Japanese anime Neon Genesis Evangelion©. The player becomes the pilot of an Evangelion giant robot and must compete for supremacy against other Evas (over the Internet or against “Bots”) in the traditional DeathMatch manner, with the exception that the Evas possess some special powers that make the game distinct from the original Unreal gameplay. The action takes place within many key locations of the Evangelion series, but the game doesn’t follow the Storyline of Evangelion. The key characters (Shinji, Rei, Misato) are not in this game, only the Evas.

The word “Evarena” is a contraction of the words Evangelion and Arena and describes quite well the overall concept of the game which is a DeathMatch between Eva robots within a limited environment.

Neon Genesis Evangelion©, created by GAINAX, was released in 1995 in Japan and is probably the most popular anime series in the world. It’s not very popular in North America since it was never aired on television, but it’s extremely popular in Asia and Europe. People from North America will learn about it a lot more in the upcoming years since ADV Films plan on doing a movie trilogy based on the anime and the special effects will be done by Weta Workshop which is the company responsible for the effects of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

Here is a short, spoilerless description of the story of Evangelion:

We’re in 2015, the world has changed since a disaster happened in the year 2000 called the Second Impact. Since this cataclysm the world is attacked by a series of giant evil creatures called “Angels”. Only the special organisation NERV possesses a weapon of equal strength to the Angels, the Evangelion Androids. Only 14 years old teenagers can pilot the Evas, which leads to a series of human drama caused by the immaturity of the pilots. The objective NERV is after is to prevent the arrival of the Third Impact, while the commander of NERV (the father of one of the pilots) has his own agenda and tries to use the Evas for his own selfish reasons, the instrumentality of the entire human race.

In the year 2015, the leaders of the Fortress-City of Neo Tokyo-3 are looking for new talents to become pilots of the ultimate fighting weapons : the Synthetic Giant Humans Evangelions. The governmental organisation NERV then decides to share on the Internet their virtual simulation combat training software called EVARENA, with which they hope to create a community of gamers that could eventually become real pilots.

We are all studying in the same University and we are doing this game as our bachelor’s degree synthesis project. We must have a demo ready for the end of April 2005. We then intend to complete the game early this summer and have a worldwide release on the Internet early August 2005 with support, fixes and updates to the project until 2006.

The game is free, this entire project is non-profit-making, but you must have your own copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 in order to play the game and of course a PC computer that is powerful enough to give you a good gaming experience.

Since the game concept doesn’t follow the original Evangelion series StoryLine, Evarena will not become a competitor to the Evangelion games that have already been released on Sega Saturn, Nintendo64 and PlayStation2. The player will be able to incarnate an Eva robot only, and not the other characters of the story like Shini, Rei or Asuka. There won’t be any Angels neither.

There have been a few other Mod project works in the past years for Quake 3 Arena, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament 2003. However, all of them were following the Storyline of the series. Thus our project is distinct from theirs on this particular topic. We believe that this attitude will grant us with the authorization from GAINAX to use the Evas design without paying the copyrights for our non-profit-making project.

Evarena will never merge with any other Eva-related projects. Nor will the 3D files, Textures and Animations be allowed to be used for any other projects, even free game characters or short movie clips. If you want to see those 3D characters you gotta play EVARENA.