Following a dinner with some media this evening, Epic's Mark Rein stood up from his table and announced that he had to get going ... he was going to go home and post on the Epic forums about an Unreal Tournament III demo. Midway PR and other Epic employees shot him the hairy eyeball, as if to say "Are we supposed to be talking about that yet?".

But Mark is unstoppable, and he wasn't kidding:

Just wanted to give you a heads' up that we're getting pretty close to releasing the Unreal Tournament 3 Beta Demo for Windows. The Beta Demo will allow instant action play against bots as well as online multiplayer. The purpose of the Beta Demo is to test the game on a large variety of hardware configurations and get gameplay feedback from the community. The development team feels they're pretty close to being ready to release this so it could come out this week but for safety sake I'd say it should be out within two weeks.

I'll be rolling out of bed tomorrow, and heading on over to Epic's offices to get some hands-on time with this supposed demo. I'm also told we might get a little peek at the mysterious single-player campaign, which is said to be Epic's most ambitious Unreal single-player experience to date (four-player co-op, baby!). 

Be sure to check back later in the week for my full impressions, and reports on how poorly my Unreal Tournament III-related s**t talking to Epic employees turned out.