Since the announcement of a new MechWarrior game for the first time in seven years, the proud new owners to the MechWarrior name, Smith and Tinker, have been building interest for the franchise, including a bold move to release the venerable MechWarrior 4 and its expansion packs online for direct download.

For free.

A Screenshot from MechWarrior 4 vanilla

This generated nerdgasms all over the gaming community who fondly remembered MechWarrior from their earlier gaming days (yours truly included), and anticipated the free re-launch. After being tied up in licensing issues by the former owner of the rights, Microsoft, the launch was greenlit and all seemed to be well for the revival of MechWarrior. Then the fans came. Busting down the doorway to MekTek.net’s webserver where the MW4 download was hosted, over 10,000 unique downloads strained and eventually crashed the server, leaving several thousands of other fans with no way to even VIEW the website since the crash took that down as well.

Needless to say, this fan is a little ticked off, but what can you do when you’re a smaller operation not used to digital distribution like this. Especially when it comes to a franchise with demand that was clearly underestimated by everyone.

EDIT: This is to confirm that the title in question being offered for free is in fact MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, not MechWarrior 4: Vengeance, the earlier title in the series.

See the article about MW4’s legal troubles with Microsoft

See the article about the crash of MekTek’s servers