Video game preservation is a constant uphill battle. Many games publishers don't seem to care all that much about it, making old tech work on new systems requires endless patience, and now Sony's discontinuing physical PlayStation games. In addition to all of that, there's the bugbear that is Windows 11, which is causing some impressively obtuse issues for older releases.
Michał Obuchowski, GOG's publishing technical manager, knows this too well. "Microsoft is reworking how elevation works - the old 'click Yes' on a UAC prompt is being replaced by something called Administrator Protection, where the system spins up a hidden, one-time admin account and a short-lived token gated behind Windows Hello," he explains to RPGSite.
"It's a reasonable security move, but for us it changes how a game asks for the permissions it needs," he adds. "And the catch is you don't really know what actually changed until Microsoft ships a preview."
"The further Windows travels from its roots, the more 30-year-old baggage it drags along," Obuchowski says. "And Microsoft keeps trimming it: Directshow suffered a regression in newer Windows 11 builds, causing some classic game videos to break in spectacular ways, legacy drivers, [and] old copy-protection schemes which may prove tricky to remove, making it ever more important to ship games DRM-free."
For a tech giant invested in new software like Microsoft, many of these alterations could seem minute, but as Obuchowski observes: "Every time a piece of [Windows] gets retired, something from 1998 can stop booting."
GOG's done some miracle work over the years restoring older games to a playable state. Relatively obscure projects like Ecstatica and Clive Barker's Undying are now preserved and buyable in their original state, as well as genre-defining greats, such as the first three Resident Evil games.
In each and every case, the GOG team would have been up against disjointed technology, exacerbated by Windows. I don't have much faith that aspect will get any easier, which makes it all the more crucial that we support preservation initiatives.
