i just learned about this No One Lives Forever "revival project" that just hosts the game and its sequels with all their latest patches/mods to make them work on modern systems. and you can just download them and they work.
there's basically a huge legal whothefuckknows about who actually owns the damn license, which is why it's not sold anywhere anymore. and this project exists almost explicitly as a dare for one of them to do something about it. but they haven't! for 7 years now! because they don't want to untangle the red tape or something. so they just stay hosting three full games with no consequence! games preservation praxis.