Promoting the upcoming Shadow Warrior remake in development at Flying Wild Hog, publisher Devolver Digital has made the original 3D Realms title free-to-play on Steam, for both PC and Mac.

According to the Devolver Blog, they had originally planed to limit free Steam licenses for the game to 50,000 in exchange for likes on the new game's Facebook page, but the entire batch was compromised by "some folks" sidestepping their security measures, so they've instead opted to make it permanently free.

So what to do? The idea was to let fans of the original game and folks that had not tried it before have a chance to download it for free and get involved in the community for the reimagined Shadow Warrior that our friends at Flying Wild Hog are developing for release later this year. Now we just had a lot of disappointed fans that wanted to get the game but the promotional app was, for lack of a better term, empty and there were no more keys at the ready to reload it. And if we did, wouldn’t they just get zapped again? With some of the original keys, that were meant to be free, already being sold online we had to do something.

Well, we made the decision to go ahead and make the game free to play for anyone on Steam. Originally, the team thought we’d just make it for a limited time (as the Facebook feed clearly illustrates) but then we realized why not just let it be free forever. There were never plans to charge for this base version of the original game so why not let everyone have a go at it.

The free release reportedly does not include the two expansions, Wanton Destruction and Twin Dragon, which can still be purchased DRM-free in the Shadow Warrior: Complete bundle for US$5.99 over at GOG.com.

Further details have yet to be announced for the Shadow Warrior remake, but it is presumed to be targeting PC and current generation console platforms. If you're yet to see it, catch the teaser trailer below.