Download Blizzard Classics The Lost Vikings and Rock ‘n Roll Racing – For Free!

by Malon - 6 years ago

If you love Vikings and/or racing, this one’s for you. Blizzard’s classic ’90s games (so classic that they were developed when the company was known as Silicon & Synapse!) The Lost Vikings and Rock ‘n Roll Racing are now available to download for free, straight from your Battle.net account page. Head over to ‘Download Game Clients‘ (underneath the green ‘Add a Game Key’ button) and then scroll to the bottom of the page. Both titles will appear under ‘Classic Games’, alongside another free Blizzard game, Blackthorne.

Non-US folks will need to use a small workaround: at the very bottom-left of the page when you log in you’ll see your region. Click it and change to ‘Americas – English (US)’. Hey presto! You can now access American account services.

Alternatively – with thanks to Reddit posters who pointed this out – you can simply click here, which will take you to the download page without needing a Battle.net account.

The Lost Vikings is a side-scrolling action/adventure game where the player fights to escape from the alien emperor Tomator, who has kidnapped the Vikings to use as exhibits in his zoo. On the way they travel through many different time periods, peppered with Blizzard’s own brand of tongue-in-cheek humour and art (one of the Vikings has a builder’s bum when he climbs down ladders).

The player controls three Vikings: Erik the Swift, Olaf the Stout and Baleog the Fierce (the names might be familiar to any WoW player – they were lost dwarfs in the Uldaman dungeon pre-Cataclysm and in an Alliance questline in the Badlands when that expansion was launched). The game focuses around the concept of solo-player teamwork, as you must make use of all of the Vikings’ abilities to get through a level. Erik can run fast, jump and charge enemies; Olaf can block with his shield, use it as a glider or as a step for Erik; Baleog can kill enemies with his sword or bow, and fire arrows to activate switches from afar.

Rock ‘n Roll Racing is a battle racer featuring what might be one of the period’s best heavy metal/rock music soundtracks; licensed titles include ‘Born to be Wild’ and ‘Bad to the Bone’. The game is set across several planets such as Serpentis, Aurora and Fleagull. Players can choose from one of six characters, with different mixtures of skill points in acceleration, top speed, cornering and jumping; Olaf also makes a cameo as a playable character, through cheat codes! The game uses an isometric viewpoint (which can be difficult to get used to) and courses quickly become littered with hazards from previous laps – including, but not limited to, mines, lava, oil slicks and snow storms.

Update: The version of RNRR being offered appears to be a demo version of the game, with only three levels available – and none of the game’s famous music.