Pick up Quake II and Quake III: Arena for free if you’re willing to download Bethesda’s launcher

I am of an age where I’ve only heard about the Quake franchise. Older sages have oft huddled around the glow of a CRT monitor and imparted upon me stories of their glory days. The days of beefy rocket launchers, jump pads and blisteringly fast movement. Oh, how I longed to experience what they had! I sought the exhilaration of leaping from corner to corner of some abstract map, gunning enemies down in mid-air with that cheeky SMG. What a wondrous time it must have been!

So I booted up Quake Champions, and it was crappy so I never actually tried anything Quake ever again.

Yet that disappointment won’t stop me from getting in on the latest free game action! To celebrate the online version of QuakeCon, Bethesda has been making all the older Quake games free on its PC launcher. You could have picked up the original Quake last week but if you happened to miss that, there’s more free games to sink your teeth into this week! Quake II is now free on the Bethesda Launcher for 72-hours (starting last night) and all you need to do is login into the Bethesda Launcher which is, admittedly, a hefty request.

You might as well leave the Bethesda Launcher installed on your PC because next week Quake III: Arena will be free for anyone wanting to relive the glory days of a LAN party. Of course, this isn’t just a means of dishing out old games. The promotion saw Bethesda encouraging donations to a whole load of worthy charities, including NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Trevor Project, eventually raising roughly $30,000 in the week that Quake I was free. I have to imagine a similar system is being used with the current and future offers so if you feel like saving a few bucks and rather putting what you would have spent on an old Quake into a worthy cause, there’s never been a better time.

Last Updated: August 13, 2020