Steam Makes Various Retro 'Elder Scrolls' Titles Available For Free

We've talked a lot about the games in the Elder Scrolls series from the “more recent” post- ‘02 era, but good old TES 1: Arena and TES 2: Daggerfall got the ball running on bringing RPGs to the mainstream, so they totally deserve their share of love. Boy, isn’t it such a marvelous coincidence that Steam has decided to make these two legends and a few other Bethesda classics available for free just when we were about to talk about them? Yes, the Bethesda launcher is closing down after losing the battle against Steam, and Steam is taking the very post-medieval stance of sharing the spoils of war with everyone. Steam now allows us all to enjoy Arena, the first game in the Elder Scrolls series, an RPG that combined a sprawling open world, customizable spells, a day and night cycle, and a first-person perspective that showcased the game's awesome graphics. 

Nowadays, those elements are but the minimum requirements for most to even consider installing a game, but Arena completely revolutionized the industry back in '93 when the game was released. Just kidding! The game only shipped 3,000 copies upon release and took a lot of time and good word of mouth to grow into something large enough to allow for Bethesda to stay afloat. Good that they did, because that allowed for the creation of Daggerfall, a game that improved upon Arena in every single aspect and even aspects and even had the time to introduce what we now call procedurally generated worlds.

Steam is also inviting everyone to play Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, an Elder Scrolls-unrelated multiplayer classic perfect to quench a bit of that neverending thirst for nostalgia (and for killing nazis).

Top Image: Bethesda