Warframe 1999 is right around the corner, bringing fans of the live service shooter back to a wild but enticing setting that mixes dark tech fantasy with turn-of-the-millennium vibes. It looks marvelous, and now developer Digital Extremes is being incredibly generous by giving away Dark Sector, its debut game that was a predecessor to what you see in Warframe today, totally free to those on Steam.

While Warframe veterans will no doubt be aware of its existence, I bet that the majority of gamers out there will have never heard of Dark Sector. In 2009, it arrived on PC several months after initially releasing on consoles. It launched as a gritty, single-player, third-person shooter that put you in the shoes of Hayden Tenno, a CIA agent infiltrating a fictional Soviet country near the end of the Cold War. Alongside third-person gunplay, gameplay revolves around the character’s throwable, boomerang-like Glaive. As well as being a lethal weapon for slicing up enemies from a distance, it is also a key tool for solving puzzles. Trying to aim for a more hardcore and immersive approach, there is also no HUD in Dark Sector.

While absolutely not an all-time classic by any stretch of the imagination, it is still an incredibly important game as it is the predecessor to everything hit multiplayer game Warframe has become.

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Not only are the Tennos of Warframe named after Dark Sector’s protagonist, but the game was initially meant to be a more ambitious, online experience but had to be scaled back due to a turbulent and long development cycle. Those initial plans, and much of the lore behind Dark Sector’s universe, were repurposed in the early 2010s to form Warframe. The upcoming 1999 expansion is also heavily inspired by Dark Sector, and is expected to tie in heavily with Digital Extreme’s debut title – some fans are even predicting a cameo from Hayden Tenno himself.

In preparation, the studio is making Dark Sector totally free to claim and keep on Steam. “Pick up and play this piece of Digital Extremes history and fight back against the Technocyte Virus as Hayden Tenno!” it says in an announcement post. However, you’ll need to be speedy if you want to add the game to your library for the low, low price of nothing.

Dark Sector is free to keep on Steam right now, but this generous offer ends on Saturday, November 30 at 9am PT/ 12pm ET/ 5pm GMT/ 6pm CET. You can grab it right here.

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For more on what’s arriving in the new Warframe expansion, head on over to our Warframe 1999 guide. Alternatively, here are some other amazing free PC games that you can jump into today.

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