Good Old Games

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Ars Technica and GOG team up to bring you a pile of our favorite games

That changed with the 1992 release of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, or ST25 to its friends, which brought the original series Enterprise and its crew to life in glorious 256-color VGA. And to players’ vast relief, it was not a half-baked effort—locations like the Enterprise bridge were lovingly recreated, with beautiful atmospheric sound effects lifted straight from the TV show permeating every scene. The character art is sharp, and it’s easy to tell Bones from Spock. The entire game is like a love letter to OG Trek.

Screenshot of ST25 showing bridge crew

Ah, that old Enterprise bridge feeling.

Credit: GOG / Interplay

Ah, that old Enterprise bridge feeling. Credit: GOG / Interplay

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the time, ST25 is a mouse-driven point-and-click adventure game. It’s broken up into seven discrete chapters, with each chapter being a self-contained mission with problems to solve and objectives to accomplish. Starfleet Command is always watching—complete the minimum number of objectives and an admiral will give you a middling performance review. Go above and beyond and do everything, even your bonus objectives, and you’ll have lavish praise heaped upon you by a grateful admiralty.

The missions themselves tend to follow a pattern. Each starts with the crew of the Enterprise on the bridge as Kirk makes a log entry. Starting with the CD-ROM issue of the game, all the lines are fully voiced by the original cast, so every mission kicks off with Bill Shatner’s familiar “Captain’s log…” lead-in telling us what we need to examine, investigate, locate, or shoot at. (Sadly, the only major voice cast omission in this one is Majel Barrett as the computer.)

Then there’s what I always felt was the weakest part of the game: Most missions kick off with some sort of space battle, where the player has to awkwardly maneuver the Enterprise with the mouse, dodging phaser blasts and photon torpedoes (or just eating them because the controls are just that awful) and trying to blow the other ship up before it does the same to you.

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GOG revamps its “Dreamlist” feature to better pry old games out of publishers

Black & White was intriguing; it had classic Molyneaux over-reach and deserves, in the words of one Ars staffer, a re-release so that “a new generation can realize just how janky it is.” As detailed in a documentary by Noclip, the B&W games are stuck in publishing purgatory. Microsoft acquired Lionhead’s IP and assets, while Electronic Arts retains the publishing rights to the B&W games, and nobody has yet been able to align those two very large planets.

GOG has added its own “Our Pick” tag to games it wants to see brought forward onto modern systems. Among them is Freelancer, which Ars’ Samuel Axon described in our 2024 roundup of non-2024 games as “a sincere attempt to make games like Elite (Dangerous) and Wing Commander: Privateer far more accessible.” GOG selected Freelancer as one of its staff picks for the Dreamlist, citing its “dynamic economy and engaging storyline.”

The main thing GOG would be fixing with Freelancer, as with many games, would be simple availability, as the game is not available on any proper digital storefront. Axon reports that, in having an original disc, installing Freelancer was not too hard, with the installer working in Windows 11. You can apply community patches, like an “HD Edition” mod, but Axon preferred playing at a non-native resolution (1024×768) at 4:3 and adjusting his monitor.

Other notable games GOG and its voting public want to see brought back are Final Fantasy VII (the original, not the remake), the point-and-click Discworld adventure, Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection, and The Operative: No One Lives Forever.

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GOG’s Preservation Program is the DRM-free store refocusing on the classics

The classic PC games market is “in a sorry state,” according to DRM-free and classic-minded storefront GOG. Small games that aren’t currently selling get abandoned, and compatibility issues arise as technology moves forward or as one-off development ideas age like milk.

Classic games are only 20 percent of GOG’s catalog, and the firm hasn’t actually called itself “Good Old Games” in 12 years. And yet, today, GOG announces that it is making “a significant commitment of resources” toward a new GOG Preservation Program. It starts with 100 games for which GOG’s own developers are working to create current and future compatibility, keeping them DRM-free and giving them ongoing tech support, along with granting them a “Good Old Game: Preserved by GOG” stamp.

Selection of games available in GOG's

Credit: GOG

GOG is not shifting its mission of providing a DRM-free alternative to Steam, Epic, and other PC storefronts, at least not entirely. But it is demonstrably excited about a new focus that ties back to its original name, inspired in some part by its work on Alpha Protocol.

“We think we can significantly impact the classics industry by focusing our resources on it and creating superior products,” writes Arthur Dejardin, head of sales and marketing at GOG. “If we wanted to spread the DRM-free gospel by focusing on getting new AAA games on GOG instead, we would make little progress with the same amount of effort and money (we’ve been trying various versions of that for the last 5 years).”

GOG Preservation Program’s launch video.

Getting knights, demons, and zombies up to snuff

What kind of games? Scanning the list of Good Old Games, most of them are, by all accounts, both good and old. Personally, I’m glad to see the Jagged Alliance games, System Shock 2Warcraft I & IIDungeon Keeper Gold and Theme ParkSimCity 3000 Unlimited, and the Wing Commander series (particularly, personally, Privateer). Most of them are, understandably, Windows-only, though Mac support extends to 34 titles so far, and Linux may pick up many more through Proton compatibility beyond the 19 native titles to date.

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