There's quite a few old-school shooters that are open-source, for example:
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https://xonotic.org/ is a Quake-like arena shooter.
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https://unvanquished.net/ is an asymmetric arena shooter (humans vs. aliens) with RTS elements.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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Holy shit is Unvanquished a remake of the old Tremulous game? I used to love it. It has now been kept updated on github
Wikipedia calls it a "spiritual successor" to Tremulous. 😅
Hell yeah
Is Urban Terror still up and running? I haven't heard that mentioned for awhile.
Not sure, I've heard of it before myself, but if this is the webpage, then some dev log was posted 18 days ago, so I imagine, there's also still players. 🙃
I used to play it often on Linux but that was probably 8 years ago or more. It was kind of like counter strike. I was asking because it was proprietary and I didnt know if people recommended playing it anymore. It is free to play.
Xonotic is an utterly blissful experience, just playing it, but the skillcap is so high everyone deletes me! How do I get into it?!
Ah yeah, that's tricky. I'm not actually deep into it myself. Maybe you can find a group to play with, like friends, colleagues etc.?
The friends I know who want to play games are actually quite experienced with these "boomer shooters" apparently, so they delete me but also get deleted. Maybe the parkour maps can help. Or we can put one up on here?
@burgermeister .... is team fortress 2 modern? probably not...is it free? is it super fun? ye.
I downloaded the new TF2 Classified, it's alright
I have been and will always be a fan of Splitgate. Even if you don't like the portal gameplay, the movement and gunplay is absolutely solid.
No one lives forever
Enemy Territory is still around in the form of ET: Legacy. Not sure how active it is but maybe you could find some willing players on here.
Hell yeah
Damn, your definition of old-school is very different from mine.
My go-to free old-school shooter is Freedoom. Completely free assets for the open source Doom engine form a completely free and open source game. They are currently working on giving Quake the same treatment.
Slightly newer are the Unreal games which can be downloaded for free from https://oldunreal.com/ with the blessings of Epic. I think technically you would also be allowed to get UT3 but nobody wants that.
Maybe Diffusion, a free standalone conversion of Half Life https://www.moddb.com/mods/diffusion
There is also a nice First Person Stealth game, OpenSource (my favorite) https://www.thedarkmod.com/main/
Kinda depends on how old-school you are looking for, but Splitgate is a fun free modern take on the arena shooter genre
Quake Champions is free, its close enough to the OG arena shooters to scratch the itch. Or there's Quake Live, it's not free, but it's cheap and I'm always able to find games online.
If you're open to playing against small groups, Straftat is an absolute riot. It started out as just a 1v1 game, but now you can play with 4 people. It's free, there's a ton of weird guns and maps, and the soundtrack slaps. They do sell a DLC that has hats, and additional maps, but the base game is free. I bought the DLC to support further development of the game.
Dirty bomb
I played https://www.urbanterror.info/ (kinda like Counter-Strike with more movement tech) and http://sauerbraten.org/ (closer to Quake) a lot back in the day. Both still seem to have some players kicking around. Both free.
What you want is Selaco.
Edit: Whoops, I missed the word "free." I was focusing on "old-school."
Looks cool