There have been a few games released over the last few years that have generated widespread appeal. Some of these are from the Command & Conquer range – some of the most popular realtime strategy games. It’s easy to become engrossed in a Command & Conquer game for hours at a time, particularly when the weather wasn’t great.

Red Alert, for some, was the premier product in the C&C range, partly due to the fact you could play as the US or the Soviet Union and, quite frankly, the Soviet’s had some of the better and most interesting technology. Tesla Coil anyone?

Celebrating the 13th anniversary of Red Alert – and the forthcoming major launch of Red Alert 3 – EA have decided to give away the original classic Red Alert, for free! Better still, the game and installer has been updated to work on both Windows XP and Vista.

You need to download two different discs – the Soviet and Allied discs and then use an archive manager to decompress the content. They are supplied as RAR images. There are separate installation guides for Windows XP and Vista users.

Note the download here is to the initial Allied disc. You need to download the Soviet disc separately from the EA Red Alert homepage.