News Good Old Games - 10 Year Journey, Making Old New

[Madventure]

Unrelated to the whole community manager fiasco and all that they had going on, I thought this was a cool article on how GOG went about their start and getting Old games and essentially getting them to work along with getting the help from fans and how complicated it actually it is beyond just "Get x game"

Getting the rights




Marta Adamska is head of bizdev at GOG, which entails a great deal of sleuthing to find the people who own the rights to classic games so GOG can sell them.

Marta Adamska: With classic titles, most rights are lost between companies, liquidation, bankruptcies, mergers and acquisitions. And it’s not always that obvious. Some agreements are written in a way where after a certain amount of time the rights revert to the developer. But the rights for what? The code? The IP? The character, the music? Actually, every one is separate. There are games where we’ve signed five-way agreements, and some rights went to one party and are blocked by another. It’s insanely complicated to track it all.

Let alone getting them to work in the first place, even then it's still hit or miss if they end up working

Getting old games working on modern Windows systems is often difficult. For the oldest, GOG’s biggest weapon is the DOS emulator DOSBox. One of its core developers, Peter ‘Qbix’ Veenstra, frequently helps out.


Marcin Paczynski: Most of the time all we get is email with a title and a contact person, and that’s basically it. With Harvester there were a lot of issues with how its movies are displayed. Qbix was helping us but we couldn’t find the correct codec. It was randomly happening across the whole game, and every time a tester came up to a new problem, we’d try a different codec and have to start the game all over again. Even the last outro movie went wrong, so we needed to go back to square one right at the end.

Hate them or love them, I do appreciate them for existing because I like old games and without having to go through the insane steps of making them work is worth the cost of paying for them again

GOG's 10 year journey to bring old games back to life | PC Gamer

 

[lashman]

yeah ... it's really cool they basically created the "re-releases of old ass games" market

before that it was basically up to various abandonware sites to make sure everything is preserved

 

[Teggy]

10 years and they still don’t have NOLF

 

[lashman]

10 years and they still don’t have NOLF

hopefully #soon

 

[Madventure]

I guess I should of added it from the start but:


Some games that I'm glad that they're able to have resold to me even though I had them originally

Which I was lucky enough to play the online multiplayer for and that was hilariously fun to play. You could be completely naked and still kill someone decked out in the best stuff in the game, just needed to know what you were doing.


I'm also glad for the fact they have all of the Crusader Games & Syndicate as well!

But I'm not going to go on and and on about the tons of games since that would just turn into an entirely different thread.

I just want them to release more stuff.

 

[lashman]

I just want them to release more stuff.

yes, please ... the more they release the more of it will eventually end up on steam


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also - lol:

 

[RionaaM]

10 years and they still don’t have NOLF

Some things never change

hopefully #soon

Hope is a fool's relief. We should better get used to the fact that it's never gonna come. In the unlikely case that it actually happens, it would be a pleasant surprise instead of an ongoing disappointment.

 

[Madventure]

yes, please ... the more they release the more of it will eventually end up on steam


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also - lol:

Fucking love me some hats - But yeah Sam & Max case and point the Disney/Lucas games all came out for Steam/GOG at the same time so that was awesome

 

[lashman]

Fucking love me some hats

clearly haha

But yeah Sam & Max case and point the Disney/Lucas games all came out for Steam/GOG at the same time so that was awesome

actually - they haven't ... they kept releasing them occasionally on gog throughout the years ... and then someone at disney finally remembered they also have games on steam and released all the remaining ones there at the same time

 

[MegaApple]

Their recent debacle with Thronebreaker on Steam as well as removing GOGMix lists has left a bad impression, but I cannot deny that the work they have done is nothing short of astounding.

Not only making old games run on modern system, but also rescue games that would otherwise get faded into obscurity as well as the suplimentary material like artwork, manuals and other stuff.