Why is it so hard to find a free downloadable chess database with older/historical chess games? The best free, downloadable chess database I've found is Kingbase (http://www.kingbase-chess.net). It only has games since 1990. I also have the Android Chessbase Online app, which also appears to only have relatively newer games. The only source I know of that has historical chess games is www.chessgames.com (but I don't think you can download the entire database into something like SCID). 

Why are these older games so hard to come by?
I invite you do it yourself...


  https://github.com/student-t/ExtractPGN


This is my Python repository for web crawling chess games. I use it to extract PGN chess games from Chessgames. This is an example of the games I extracted:


http://smallchess.com/Games


It's trivial to change the code such that you extract all games from chessgames (entire database) into a single PGN file. I believe you're a programmer, so that shouldn't be an issue for you.