Tribes fans rejoice! The entire franchise is now free

By Jon Martindale October 30, 2015

tribes fans rejoice the entire franchise is now free rabbit — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Hi-Rez Studios is a company that is today best known for its SMITE MOBA title, which took a very different tack to the classic Esports-centric genre, but did quite well with it. However, before it was known for over-the-shoulder, team-based combat, Hi-Rez was the caretaker of the Tribes series. And it still is — so to celebrate a full 21 years since the original game in the franchise was issued, Hi-Rez has made them all available for free.

The history of Tribes stretches far further back than Hi-Rez’s 2012 release of Tribes Ascend, and even further than its original Tribes Universe MMO, which it began developing several years before; back before it was even called Tribes in actuality. The first game considered part of that series is Metaltech: Earthsiege, which was itself a spin-off of Metaltech, released in 1994.

Metaltech: Earthsiege eventually led to Earthsiege 2, which led to Starsiege, which led to Starsiege: Tribes. While they are all within the same universe, those latter two games are for many, the beginning of the true Tribes series of titles.

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All of them though are part of the Hi-Rez Tribes collection, along with Tribes 2, Tribes: Aerial Assault, Tribes: Vengeance and Tribes Ascend.

While most of the games are PC titles and therefore quite a doddle to download and play from the Tribes Universe page, Aerial Assault is a PS2 title, so you will need an emulator or a modified PS2 to play it. Whichever game you want to play though, they all comes as .ISO files, so you will need some basic virtual drive knowledge to get it all working, but we’d imagine anyone delving into historical gaming like this will be more than willing to learn if needed.

Of course the multiplayer in these games isn’t the easiest to get working as there aren’t any official servers for anything but Ascend and finding people to play with otherwise is difficult, but there are a few Redditors who are happy to play (via PCGamer) so give them a shout if you’re interested.

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