Putting the Good Old Games Back in GOG

I've always really liked GOG.com. At first it was to indulge myself in all of the retro PC games that they were bringing back for folks to play, and then I started to warm up to the whole DRM-free thing, not to mention it was a great alternative to simply getting everything on Steam.

For a time, though, it felt like GOG was trying to get away from the whole old game reputation that it was becoming known for. There was that whole thing a year or two ago where they decided their name wasn't an acronym for Good Old Games anymore, and started pushing more indie titles and movies through their platform. This is all fine and dandy. It's important to diversify sometimes. I still make a point of getting indie titles from GOG rather than Steam when I have the option, but I have yet to watch any of those moves as I can't be arsed to give them the time of day.

Nonetheless, this shift did get me wondering about how seriously GOG would go after classic games in the future. It is a pretty difficult task having to dig to figure out who owns the rights to what in order to get all of the legal permissions to put a game on their service. Just looks at something like the No One Lives Forever series. People have been clamouring for this to get re-released for years, and eventually the team that was trying to make it happen said it was just too difficult to get through the legal hurdles. So, getting more classic games on GOG could be tough.

At least that's what I told myself. There were already a ton of classics on GOG, so maybe it was just the natural order of things for the number of new entries to slow down. Sure we'd get the occasional niche game to appear there or some such, but not the super, crazy, big name ones that were conspicuously absent from their library. Just looking at all of the Might and Magic, Wing Commander, Ultima, and Infinity Engine games they already have, it would take years to play through all of those.

I was all set to just assume we were in for a slow ride as the well spring of classics was seemingly running dry, but then this year happened and it's as if GOG decided to re-embrace the classics with a rekindled burning passion.

Over the last several months we've seen a deluge of old games appear on the platform. There have been a number of Star Wars games to come along that up to this point haven't seen a re-release, we got the Star Trek adventure games, a number of Warhammer classics, and recently even the Eye of the Beholder and D&D Gold Box series came to GOG, something people had been wanting for ages.

So, it seems like things are getting back on track as far as classic gaming on GOG is concerned, and this makes me happy, as I do quite like these old games. As always, the question remains as to what they'll get a hold of next. Even just the other day a bunch of old Elder Scrolls games (including Red Guard!) as well as classic Doom games were added to their selection. I'm a-okay with the indie games and whatnot that they've been pursuing in recent years, but still it's nice to see GOG going after the classics with renewed vigor of late.B