14 DAY TRIAL // While most digital distribution services mainly rely on the newest and most popular games to boost their sales, Good Old Games takes a very retro approach to the idea. Started in 2008 by CD Projeckt, the service provides vintage PC games without applying any digital-rights management. As a pretty new formed service, GOG is still gathering publishers under its tabs, and from now on the digital service will steadily add some of Activision's older titles.
As far as future plans go, neither GOG nor Activision have announced what games will be launched through the digital service, beyond the ones that just became available. First up is the 2001 RPG from Troika Games, (which also developed Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines) Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magic Obscura, and the second is Sierra's 1993 Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Both titles are some heavy names in the gaming history, even if they're not all that popular and famous.
"Signing the agreement with Activision is the biggest thing that's happened at GOG.com since the actual announcement of the service. This is a huge step forward for our site and for digital distribution as a whole, as Activision is one of the biggest publishers in the world with a long history in the games industry," Adam Oldakowski, GOG's managing director, said. "We're even happier to bring Activision games back to gamers, as GOG.com is the only place right now, where you can grab the announced titles. We've also managed to work on those titles to provide full compatibility with modern operating systems."
As it is usual with GOG, the titles are void of any DRM, and, as far as the compatibility goes, in the past, the service used Open Source emulation and compatibility software, like ScummVM and DOSBox, so we can probably expect something similar for Arcanum and Gabriel Knight as well. The games aren't exactly a hot release, so the price asked for is in accordance with their underlying condition. Priced by GOG at $5.99, the titles will bring a smile on a lot of faces, especially to those who played the games in the past, but lost their physical copy to the wear of time.