GOG launches “Preservation Program” for porting and maintaining “Good Old Games” to modern PCs with 92 classic games

Thursday at 06:38 PM

DRM-free game storefront GOG, per the original announcement blog post, recently announced a new “Preservation Program” for retro PC games that will be maintained for and playable on modern platforms. Any game in this program is considered a “Good Old Game” preserved by GOG, and GOG is largely dedicating its own resources to maintaining many of these long-abandoned titles.

The goal is to ensure that “this version is the best and most complete available anywhere, including compatibility, manuals, and other bonus content, but also DLCs and even features not present in other editions” and that you can “expect it to work on current and future popular PC configurations.” GOG will even provide technical support for these games, should it still be needed, and add modern gamepad support, where applicable.

At the time of writing, this program includes 92 games, and there are plans to add more in the coming months. The catalog will be maintained for compatibility with newer hardware and operating systems and expanded over time with more games.

GOG Preservation Program – Make Games Live Forever – YouTube
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For now, quite a few classic series are present here—from PC staples like Diablo and Warcraft to console ports like Resident Evil 1 through 3. There are even full articles, including changelogs detailing how the original PC version of the game came to be and what GOG did to fix it. The Resident Evil trilogy post helps establish expectations for old console port PC games, and they’re looking pretty good.

All the Resident Evil games got an improved DirectX renderer, added support for V-Sync and other critical video settings (i.e., gamma correction), and even enabled anti-aliasing for enhanced visual clarity. This is just the highlight of dozens of crucial bug fixes and improvements applied to each game, but it helps establish some expectations for games in the program and to be added in the future.

There’s nothing to complain about here. This is a solid game preservation win, and the ever-consumer-friendly GOG is still providing all of this DRM-free, which may benefit pirates but certainly benefits paying customers who don’t appreciate invasive DRM software. Goodwill goes a long way, and good art lasts forever—GOG, at least, is doing its part by making sure PC classics last forever, too.

That said, the announcement video noticeably uses AI or text-to-speech voiceover. Considering the fancy graphics and all the people clearly employed by GOG, we can’t help but find that decision tacky and a little strange—surely a single minute of voiceover from an existing employee wouldn’t have added significant time to this video’s release.

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