GOG is saving retro games from oblivion. Who else will step up?

I just listened to Disintegration by The Cure. Legally.“How thrilling,” you might respond. “Will you now regale us with tales of eating a sandwich, or wearing a mildly interesting hat?” Fortunately, no. But the point is this: try doing the same with a game you loved from 1989. Or even 1999. Chances are that you can’t, unless you have access to original hardware and media that (miraculously) remain in working order, or plunge into the murky world of (mostly not legal) emulation. Which is why I’m happy GOG – Good Old Games – has kicked off its Preservation Program.

Saving old games and making them accessible isn’t new for GOG, which has fought the good fight for years. The Preservation Program formalises and slaps an official badge on prior ad-hoc efforts to, as GOG puts it, ensure history doesn’t erase the games that shaped you. There will initially be 100 games in the effort, including quality fare like Sim City 2000, Theme Park, Fallout, Diablo, Resident Evil and The Curse of Monkey Island. They’ll all remain playable on modern PCs, despite the devs having abandoned them. And they’re buy-once, DRM-free, with offline installers. Lovely.

Lost levels

But this should not be noteworthy. It should barely warrant a comment, let alone a column. Yet GOG remains an outlier in an industry that shows a disregard for its own history no better than when the BBC routinely wiped its own archives. In fact, it’s in some ways worse: we now know people like to revisit old media, and there are many ways to do so. There’s no excuse. Yet game preservation efforts remain rare, bar the same old hits being trotted out for you to rebuy time and again. Which is not so much preservation as random resurrection, before said titles are again consigned to an indeterminable period of oblivion.

Fortunately, GOG has some allies in the commercial space. Two notable examples are Antstream and Digital Eclipse. The former is a kind of Spotify for retro games – a streaming service that benefits from wide platform support. And while it lacks Mario and Sonic, its catalogue of thousands of playable titles includes a raft of arcade classics, from Pac-Man to Double Dragon. By contrast, Digital Eclipse zeroes in on a few specific games, and looks to also preserve the stories behind them by way of interactive documentaries. Examples include releases on Tetris and pioneering British games creator Jeff Minter.

Extra life

Yet questions remain about even these ventures. How scalable are they? How future proof? Interactive documentaries are great, but high-effort and tied to specific hardware, which gives them a limited shelf life. GOG’s game preservation efforts are laudable, but how many titles can be kept working indefinitely, when they’re pay-once – and at low-cost? And Antstream scales well, but exists at the whim of IP owners, and would wink out of existence should the service fail. (GOG at least leaves you a DRM-free file to play.) Meanwhile, purists grumble about any commercial underpinnings of such efforts, and point at emulators as the One True Way To Retro Gaming Goodness.

Personally, I applaud GOG, Antstream and Digital Eclipse for trying their best. And, for me, the bigger question is why so few others in the gaming world don’t do more, with commercial entities instead keeping the bulk of gaming history locked away, forever. There should be dozens of GOGs, covering everything from the Dreamcast to arcade classics. Places where you could buy and own digital copies of old favourites, in a format that lets you play them indefinitely. But history has shown there’s less chance of that than me returning to 1989’s Rick Dangerous and completing it on my first go. Not that I’ve any means to legally do that anyway.