Get all Tribes games for free — the whole saga, from Earthsiege to Ascend

Celebrating more than twenty years of the franchise, Hi-Rez Studios made every Tribes game free to download — seven classics of jetpack-fueled shooters, free for the taking.

In an era of ray guns and rocket launchers, Tribes was the genre’s avant-garde: skiing physics, huge maps, aerial combat, and a skill ceiling so high that studios are still chasing what it did. Being the cutting edge is a complicated business — Tribes was fiercely loved by those who played it and perpetually overlooked by the masses, a victim of its own eccentricity. The free release was Hi-Rez’s gift to the game’s legacy.

The full lineage, all gratis: Metaltech: Earthsiege (1994), Earthsiege 2 (1996), Starsiege: Tribes (1998), Tribes 2 (2001), Tribes: Aerial Assault (2002), Tribes: Vengeance (2004), and the then-recent Tribes: Ascend (2012) — each built on the same fluid, online essence of massive maps and fast, airborne play.

It never matched Halo, Battlefield, or Call of Duty commercially, but Tribes earned a permanent place in shooter history: fast, precise, and fun in a way nothing else quite replicated.

The giveaway itself ran through Hi-Rez’s Tribes Universe site, which has long since gone dark — one of those freebies that only survives in memory. If you love free games, the modern heir is Prime Gaming, which still hands out full PC titles to Prime members every month: check what’s on offer, then read our gear shelf for the rest of the free-value stack.