The GOG Preservation Program has been revealed by CD Projekt’s DRM-free digital storefront, the company deciding to take a more active step of ensuring that classic games remain playable on modern systems.
At the launch of this program, 100 games have been handed a ticket into the Preservation Program, with GOG running it through various quality tests to ensure that it runs well on modern systems. If it can pass those test, it’s stamped with a Good Old Game status on the store, and if it doesn’t, then GOG will provide active tech support to help ensure that the game will work again.
“We test and update the games so they work flawlessly on the most popular PC configurations – now and in the future,” they write in an FAQ. “The PC landscape is constantly evolving, with changes like new Windows updates or graphics card drivers occasionally affecting compatibility. If you encounter any issue with a game in the program, please contact our customer support so that we can verify and fix this issue for everyone. This helps us maintain the quality of those titles.”
GOG, which lest we forget already stands for Good Old Games, was first launched with a library of 90s and early 2000s classic, back when Windows XP was still in heavy use and Windows 7 was a new operating system on the block. Even then, with significant OS changes made in Windows Vista, such as with 64-bit CPUs, it was pretty common to need to run a game in a compatibility mode, but GOG ensured that games added would be playable on the latest OS.
GOG tracks what changes are made to each game in the program, even if it’s as simple as noting that they have validated stability and compatibility with Windows 10 and 11. Other changes can be more significant.
As GOG has grown, it’s morphed to be a more general purpose digital storefront, selling newer games, so long as they can be sold DRM-free. Those games are generally outside the purview of this programme, though that doesn’t mean there aren’t some more modern surprises that are featured.
So yes, there’s 90s classics like the original Fallout, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and Riven, but there’s also Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas, Dragon Age: Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Mad Max.
Dragon Age: Origins is a key example of what GOG will do, with an update that has added Large Address Aware support for better memory usage, and limited the game to run on 2 CPU cores to boost performance.
However, they will not include community patches, beyond replicated well understood fixes – “The GOG Preservation Program aims to preserve the original game and make it playable on modern machines. This means being very careful with any modification that might alter the original experience. We also want to avoid passing the responsibility of maintaining the game’s quality on to the community, as it wouldn’t be fair to you.”
This is a great move by GOG, getting back to their roots, and highlighting game preservation and access once again. This very regularly ends up in the forefront of gaming discussion, as servers are switched off or companies seek to lock up their back catalogues,
