One of the few PC games I had a CD-ROM of as a kid was Battlefield 1942. Sure, kids shouldn’t play Battlefield, but the early 2000s were when today’s playerbase of war games for anyone under the age of 14 started taking shape. I remember finding the flying helmets after a headshot particularly impressive, something that’s slightly unsettling today.
I can’t remember exactly when I played the game, but it was probably around 2005. Now, 20 years later, I’m not that interested in Battlefield 6, which is just around the corner, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I could relive the memories of blowing up tanks and shooting soldiers with my sniper.
Years of history are gone
Turns out, if you don’t own a CD with Battlefield 1942, you can’t play the game in 2025. Nobody can. The only way to have legal access to the original Battlefield is if you added it to your collection on EA Games’ launcher, Origin, when the company gave it away in 2012 to celebrate the franchise’s 10th anniversary.
You can also buy the used CDs on eBay for $10 or cheaper, actually, but you have no guarantees it will run on a modern operating system like Windows 11.
The oldest title in the franchise on EA’s online Store is Battlefield 3 (2011). The same is true for Steam. Battlefield 3 is the only title with official support by the company and the closest one to the origin of the series, which also means 11 games, spanning 10 years of Battlefield history, are impossible to play on the main PC platforms. The situation will probably not improve. With EA’s $55 billion sale to private investors, it’s unlikely things will change. The new owners want profit, and that’s certainly not coming from providing support to a 2002 game a millennial like me is nostalgic about. So I decided to see if I could at least play one of these lost games.
Battlefield: Vietnam, the sequel to Battlefield 1942, was the closest I got to finding a way to play the origin of the franchise. The game files I found to install it were on a ZIP file on one of these game preservation websites, with a lengthy “how to install” section with eight steps to run the game on Windows 10 or 11. That included running an .exe file I had to pray my antivirus was scanning correctly. While you can run Battlefield: Vietnam on PC, you can’t get it to work on modern PlayStation or Xbox consoles through retro-compatibility, and they aren’t in collection packs of any kind for a digital download.
It seems like the only hope left to save the story of Battlefield 1942 and play the game today is a Steam Community post. It has yet another compressed file that installs the patched game for you with a bunch of community-made fixes and updates. If it weren’t for these fans, it would be literally impossible to play the first Battlefield ever today if you didn’t own the original CD that survived the test of time since 2002.
And all those fan-made downloads are actually illegal, because EA still owns the right to the game; it just chose not to sell it anymore. It’s very unlikely that any company will go after the end user for pirating an abandoned game, but the people keeping Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield: Vietnam alive will always be at risk for distributing them. We need brave groups of individuals to take actions that could put them in trouble to keep these games alive.
Really, just stop killing games
This abandonment isn’t unique to Battlefield and EA, but other companies have made an effort to preserve many of their old games. Nintendo’s been releasing digital downloads for their biggest retro hits on their new consoles since the Wii. Other developers release packs with their old titles, like Konami’s Castlevania collections and SEGA’s Sonic Origins. Hell, they could even just leave the game servers running with rare updates like Valve does with old Counter-Strike games.
It’s a shame how it’s so easy for game companies to erase the history of their own franchises. Battlefield 1942 is outdated for modern standards, but it holds the key to what made players fall in love with the series and what made it survive for over two decades. Preserving the game is also respecting players’ memories and the origins of the game design that made the game grow to the size it is today.
The post The one Battlefield game I actually played is gone and almost lost to time forever appeared first on Destructoid.
