If you are a pixel lover and a defender of gaming culture, you will be happy happy because GOGthe DRM-free gaming platform that we all love, has just joined the ranks ofEFGAMP (European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects).
Indeed, the year 2024 marked a decisive turning point in collective awareness of the erosion of video game heritage and with the current trend of dematerialized games which disappear faster than a high score on an arcade machine. unplugged, it was time for someone to take charge!
On the one hand, we therefore have the GOG Preservation Program which has already proven itself with more than 100 games under its protection and more than 500 technical improvements… And when we talk about running a game from the 90s on a modern PC, it’s sometimes more complex than solving the puzzles of Myst because you have to ensure:
- Compatibility with modern systems
- Optimization performance
- Conservation you gameplay original
- Protection against obsolescence
- And maintaining access for owners after games are removed
And for its part, this federation EFGAMP brings together more than 20 heritage institutions and dedicated organizations that you probably know, including:
- The Video Game Museum of Rome
- MO5.COM in France
- The Computer Games Museum in Berlin
- The Dutch Institute of Sound and Image
- The Embracer Games Archive
GOG thus becomes the first Polish company to join this prestigious alliance and Maciej Gołębiewski, Managing Director of GOG, underlines the importance of this mission: “As a European company, we feel the responsibility to lead the preservation of video game heritage. The very creation of GOG was motivated by this goal of preservation.”
This alliance brings concrete advantages such as guaranteeing the ability to play the classics that we love with lasting access to versions optimized for our recent systems and of course strong protection against the eradication of games withdrawn from sale.
Of course, the path to preservation remains strewn with pitfalls because there are very complex copyright issues to manage, obsolete technologies very complex to maintain, proprietary formats very complex to decode, and all that with limited resources… Breeeeef, you will have understood that it is very complex ^^ but IMPORTANT!!
So, the union of GOG and EFGAMP represents a crucial step in safeguarding our video game heritage and I hope that this collaboration will allow us to play even more new “old games”.
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