GOG Preserves More Games (March 25, 2025)

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
In November, GOG announced something called the "GOG Preservation Program" which aims to make sure the site's most popular offerings are constantly updated to remain available on ever-changing modern operating systems. This week they've added both Wing Commander 1 + 2 and Privateer 2: The Darkening to the program.

As promised, another wave of classics joins the GOG Preservation Program!

To preserve gaming history, we’re adding horror, action, and strategy icons from legendary franchises—ensuring they remain playable in their best versions and yours to keep forever.

Let’s welcome...

Silent Hill 4: The Room – being the only PC version with previously missing content restored.

F.E.A.R. Platinum – honoring Monolith’s legacy by ensuring this legendary FPS horror lives forever.

And alongside them, even more masterpieces:

Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption
Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Legend, Underworld
Alone in the Dark 1, 2, 3
Fallout 2
Deus Ex GOTY Edition
Ultima™ 1+2+3, 4+5+6, 8 Gold Edition
Wing Commander™ 1 & 2
Jagged Alliance 2
Privateer 2: The Darkening
Port Royale 3
Alien Breed + Tower Assault
Cannon Fodder 1 & 2

Find all 26 new additions here.

Which of these classics will you revisit first? Let us know.

The GOG Preservation Program is only growing—with regular updates, continuous improvements, and our unrelenting commitment to making games live forever. Expect new games being added each month.

And if your all-time favorite isn’t available anywhere, head to the GOG Dreamlist, vote for it, share your story, and help us bring it back to safeguard your gaming legacy.

Vote here.

It’s your passion for these games that keeps them alive—thank you for being part of this journey. See you soon!
Click to expand...


They join Wing Commander III and the original Privateer which were already covered by the program. The system is vote-based, so get out there and show them that we want WC4, Prophecy and Secret Ops, Academy and Armada... added to a list? Cynics might call this 'supporting products they continue to actively sell' and those cynics would be right except that there seemingly haven't been any been any material changes made to these game packages. Some of them--Privateer 2 in particular!--have been in very bad shape for years and all of them have inferior configurations which have been endlessly documented by players and which could be easily fixed in minutes.




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Original update published on March 25, 2025
 
Yea, I noticed there was an update for these 3 titles when I logged into gog a few days ago. For WC 1&2 the initial startup dos menu has changed from yellow/green to white/purple and you can now run the classic dos setup programs. I think it may have changed the conf files as my mt32 munt sound emulation is now completely messed up, I suspect Windows update may have played a part in that too 🤔
 
Well, some of us knew - retro enthusiasts who loved the games of the 90s knew. As someone growing up in the 90s, you could never afford the high end computer you wanted to play those games, while these days, a low end PC can pretend to be that high end PC. And it's not like PCs today are still able to play games from the 90s - many things are no more like the original Sound Blaster cards.

Of course, the GoG preservation program will probably have its next leap when they can use something like 86Box instead of DOSBox to run those games. (86Box is an accurate PC emulator so it'll emulate the actual CPU and all the hardware, so you can get actual Voodoo graphics since you can slot in whatever virtual graphics card you want. Of course, it also consumes way more CPU power).

It's the same reason people preserve old movies and videos and other stuff.
 
86Box sounds interesting, first I've heard of it. Sounds like it could do something for the backgrounds in Starlancer. I messed around with the Voodoo glide wrapper with various settings but I can never get those backgrounds to look quite right. Still plays very well though.
 
86Box (and PCem which it's based on) is amazing - the problem with using them in commercial contexts is that it's so accurate, it requires dumps of the ROM chips on the original boards, which can't be included directly for (justified) fear of legal action.

Eventually what I imagine will happen is that we'll have a full set of high-quality open-source ROMs for a wide enough set of hardware that we theoretically won't require the proprietary ones anymore.. Or just fully virtual/open hardware which doesn't use proprietary ROMs in the first place. Then places like GOG can start bundling it. I'm sure some exist already, I haven't looked in detail...
 
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