Awesome news today for anybody who likes the games of yesteryear as much as I do: GOG.com (aka “Good Old Games”) has been talking about a secret deal for months, and today it can be revealed: the deal is with Activision, and the two companies will be re-releasing some of the PC gems in the Activision back catalog — and that includes stuff from the Sierra library, since that was part of the whole Vivendi/Blizzard deal. The announcement and chatter about it is here.
The first two games are up and ready: the 2001 RPG Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and 1993′s point-and-click adventure Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father.
Arcanum. Check out the dialogue options.
Both of these games are perfect examples of why I love GOG: They often find the games that got critical praise but didn’t enjoy the full success they deserved at the time, and this gives them a second chance.
Gabriel Knight. Come for the blood, stay for the excellent characters.
I started buying from GOG about a year ago and I’m a big fan of what they’re doing. I had a giant tub of cherished older PC games in my garage for years, but I finally gave up when I realized I just couldn’t run the things any more. The mid-90s were like the wild West of game development, with 3D cards just emerging as a technology and everybody having different drivers for different hardware…it was kind of a nightmare. Popping those discs into a Windows 7 machine (or frankly, even a Windows XP machine) is often pointless; the tech divide is just too wide. GOG, on the other hand, packages these games so they run perfectly on modern hardware. They’re dead cheap; no game is over $10 so far, and many are $6 (including Arcanum and Gabriel Knight). I’ve also seen special sales and deals that drop those prices even lower from time to time. There’s none of the old-school copy protection/DRM either — no code wheels, no red cellophane secret decoders, no “tell me the name of the fourth word on the ninth page of the manual” stuff. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this.) You just buy it once and you can install it on as many machines as you own. And when you see some of the games in their stable, you’ll probably be surprised — there are as many big smash-hit titles as there are little forgotten gems. That probably sounds like a sales pitch but I assure you it’s really just personal enthusiasm.
So…this brings up a great question. When do I get [favorite game name]? GOG isn’t saying exactly what’s coming next, but they have said that 20 games are in the first batch of this agreement and more Activision games will be released over the course of February, apparently every few days. I don’t expect that to be all 20, but if it’s 10, and then the rest take some time? That’s epic. I am going to dig and see if I can get any info out of them. Also, the site maintains a “most wanted” list generated by its community, so if you are passionate about a game from the past and you’d like GOG to try to reissue it, go here and chime in. I agree with a lot of those top 10s, but I am also begging every man, woman, and child to type in “Interstate 76″ — it’s one of my favorite PC games of all time. You’re lucky I haven’t had the time to go into a giant lovefest blog post about it yet. But I’d also like to hear your wishes in the comments below — what Activision or Sierra games are you hoping will show up as part of this deal?
I’ll be talking a little bit about GOG on this week’s podcast, plus I’ve got a little contest to go with it. Now back to editing said podcast…
