When GOG’s new Preservation Program was announced last November, the very welcome scheme to ensure games keep running on modern machines in perpetuity had some lofty goals. The purpose is to create a hundreds-long list of games that the Polish CD Projekt subsidiary will commit to constantly maintaining, even—it turns out—if the GOG storefront loses the rights to sell them. A lifelong commitment to preserve games, no matter how abandoned they might be by their original publishers. Hooray, we cried, as a gaming public. And while the project is very definitely pushing ahead, it turns out it’s proving a lot trickier than the company first thought. It’s even involved hiring a private detective to identify the owner of a specific game.
Speaking to The Games Business‘s Christopher Dring (thanks RPS), GOG’s senior business development manager Marcin Paczynski and its managing director Maciej Gołębiewski explained that the speed at which games stop working, and the multifarious ways in which it happens, is proving a very hefty challenge. “To be perfectly honest, it’s harder than we thought it would be,” Paczynski told the podcast.
Part of the problem is that over the last couple of decades, many of the 3,000 games GOG previously restored and ensured could work have already started to become unplayable again. So the plan was to go back over the archive and update the games with more modern solutions and fixes, while promising the “lifetime guarantee.” But, as Paczynski puts it, “what we found out when we started working on it is that the games and how they work has deteriorated way faster than we thought.”
It’s not just as simple as fixing issues with the games not launching, but more specific issues within. “We are talking about more subtle things,” Paczynski explains, “like the game not supporting modern controllers, the game not supporting ultra-wide screens or modern resolutions, or even a simple thing like being able to minimize the game.” The consequences of this are far from devastating, but it’s tempering GOG’s ambitions a little. The goal had been to reach 500 games in the Preservation Program by the end of 2025, but instead its now looking at 300 to 350.
This is all made far more complicated by many older games having been released entangled in all manner of DRM, and the way in which IP holders can be incredibly difficult about accessing source code, let alone trying to work out who exactly holds the IP rights to games. The rest of the interview is well worth a watch, as the GOG guys get into the peculiar world of trying to secure out-of-publication games, which apparently can even include reaching out to oil refineries. But most extraordinarily, the company has even resorted to using private detectives to track down reclusive rights owners just to ensure it can continue to make a game available.
Alongside the man who owned the rights to many games GOG wanted to publish who had since become a millionaire oil magnate, there was also a British guy who had inherited the rights to a collection of games, who then fell off the grid entirely. “So we hired a guy in the UK that was supposed to find him,” says Paczynski. It turned out he was living so remotely he didn’t own a cell phone or have internet access, and wasn’t even aware that he had the rights to these games. But when they found him, it turned out he was “super-supportive to preserving the legacy of his family.”
Obviously GOG is a business, and this isn’t altruism, but we’re in a time when publishers are abandoning games even in the same year as they’re being launched, so preservation is becoming more pressing than ever. It’s good to know this project is pushing ahead despite the difficulties, even if it has to slightly temper its ambition.
