Four Of The Best PC Games Ever Are Free Right Now

It feels like only a couple of months ago that we were reporting EA had pulled four of the all-time greatest PC games from sale on GOG. Because it was. At the time, the peculiar publisher ignored our questions as to why. Now, just over six weeks later, Ultima Underworlds 1 & 2, Syndicate, and Syndicate Wars are back—and until September 3, they’re free.

It was a strange decision at the time, back in June, when EA yoinked the four games from GOG, PC gaming’s natural home for ancient classics. While the Ultima Underworlds and Syndicate remained on their own cursed Origin store, 1996's Syndicate Wars was—and still is—not. It meant the Bullfrog magnum opus wasn’t available to buy anywhere.

Clearly this is indicative of an ongoing problem with maintaining publisher libraries, where access to classic games is at the mercy of the mercurial whim of giant mega-corps, who are far more interested in shifting copies of their latest than ensuring the survival of those which bring in a trickle of profit at best. So it’s certainly good news that EA have appeared to volte-face and return the games to at least one digital shop.

It’s even better news that they’re currently free (which of course any game over 25 years old should be anyway, by any reasonable measure of a functioning society). If you haven’t before, it’s certainly worth playing any of the four games, albeit with some advance warning that they are all—of course—extremely dated.

Read the full article on Kotaku