Let’s be honest, while we can get plenty of classic games online through services like Steam or GOG.com, there are tons of old titles that aren’t exactly available through traditional means. Emulation is generally illegal, and abandonware is a pretty thick grey area, so if your favorite old game isn’t sold through an online store or cheap through eBay or Amazon.com, you’re out of luck. Fortunately, several game publishers have put their best old games out for free, or released them for redistribution with permission.

Here are 6 great classic games you can get, legally and legitimately, for free. You might need DOSBox to get some of these titles running, but at least now you can run them without feeling paranoid.

The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall

Oblivion was awesome. Morrowind was awesome. Fallout 3 was awesome (and, let’s face it, it was The Elder Scrolls: Fallout Edition). You know what else was awesome? Daggerfall, the second game in The Elder Scrolls series and the first that really captured role-playing gamers’ imaginations. While Arena (also available for free online) started the story, Daggerfall’s massive world, complex game mechanics, and amazingly epic story really set the standard for the series. Also, (spoilers), there’s a giant Dwarf-built mecha powerful enough to break space-time. So, there’s that.

Grand Theft Auto 2

It’s mayhem time. Long before GTA3 (and San Andreas, and GTA 4) crawled up the collected asses of the easily panicked mass media, Grand Theft Auto (also available for free online) and Grand Theft Auto 2 set the bar for wanton criminal activity. Go back to your roots, before your cousin got a cell phone, before hot coffee needed hacking, and before the Haitians offended you and your ugly Hawaiian shirt. It might play more like Smash TV with cars than the 3D GTA games, but it’s still an awesome precursor to the series.

Tribes 2

Starscream: Tribes offered team-based, base-protecting, capture-the-flag, first-person shooter action with jetpacks before Halo: Reach was a gleam in its creators’ eyes. Tribes 2 was even better, and it’s been available for free for years now. Yes, there are still servers running, and yes, the gameplay still holds up as a rock-solid example of the genre.

Marathon

I want an epic first-person shooter with a complex sci-fi story, developed by Bungie, for free. Sorry, Halo’s still something you need to pay for, but Bungie’s original sci-fi shooter trilogy Marathon is completely free. There’s no Master Chief and no Warthogs, but there are Vac-Bobs and lots of aliens with apostrophes in their names!

Star Command 2: The Ur-Quan Masters

Remember Star Command? Probably not, but it’s one of those games that, “back in the day, it was awesome.” Part strategy game, part top-down shooter, part RPG, and totally sweet. Imagine Ultima meets Sinistar.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This game you don’t have to download or configure in any way, and still get better graphics than the original version. Infocom’s fantastic text adventure game and one of the first and greatest book/show/movie video game adaptations has two different sets of all-new graphics, all playable in your web browser on BBC Radio 4′s web page.