This post serves two purposes. On one hand all you old game lovers might want to know, that Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings is free to download from battle.net thanks to Blizzard.

On the other hand, since it is free, might we see it come to GOG in the near future?

1. It's been posted here several times already.

2. My guess is no, because it's Blizzard. "Freeware" does not mean "can be legally distributed by anybody". GOG would still need permission from Blizzard to distribute the game, and Blizzard wants to control all of their games themselves.

Then again, you need neither a Battle.net account nor any client to download them.

Funny, when I searched for myself it required an account (see attachment). I assumed the client would be a requirement in the next step of singing up.

I still don't see any old Blizzard games coming here though. Unless you know better.

Change "eu" at the beginning of the web page address to "us" and you'll get them :) No account nor client needed for that :)

REALLY? First time I've noticed it!
Must have been posted by Americans and Australians while I was sleeping or something!
SWEET! - good to see that Blackthorn wasn't a one off and more are being added!

This is awesome, unfortunately, I doubt they'll allow the original Diablo or Hellfire to be released like this.

Rock an Roll Racing is missing it's licensed music tracks.

Actually "freeware" mean just that, however just because Blizzard offering the game on its site free of charge doesn't mean they legally change it copyright status to "freeware".

Note , they contracted with the publishers of the ZSNES emulator to run this version of Rock and Roll Racing. Empire Interactive faced some controversial feedback when people found they were using MAME to power a commercially sold arcade game compilation on the PC.

Glad I could bring your attention to it :) Don't need to be so harsh. Besides, Lost Vikings just got released, so although there are posts about legacy Blizzard titles going free on their site, it was not the case until recently. Well for this particular title at least

I'm too pretty sure, that it will take a lot of time for Diablo, Warcraft or Starcraft to arrive to GOG if ever, but the titles now released as free donwloads are pretty old, and I don't think Blizzard would want to tie them to their own service. Even Activision released their old games on GOG so it could be the same with Blizzard.

To quote the Linux Foundation freeware definition: "Freeware is computer software that is made available free of charge, but which is copyrighted by its developer, who retains the rights to control its distribution, modify it and sell it in the future."

Blizzard's release perfectly matches this definition.

It wasn't my intention to be harsh, just informative. I didn't say "Hey stupid! Somebody already posted that, you moron!", now did I? In fact, I didn't say anything harsh at all. I stated a fact, nothing more. I don't like being accused of assholery unless it's true (which is sometimes the case I admit, but not this time).

And yes, there have been posts specifically about the free re-release of The Lost Vikings and Rock'n'Roll Racing on the battle.net site. Here's one.

Edit: Here's another. In a thread named "Lost Vikings", no less.

I didn't know Rock n' Roll Racing had a PC release.