GOG Expands Its Preservation Initiative with Silent Hill 4 and F.E.A.R.

The disappearance and unavailability of classic titles is causing an existential crisis in all of video gaming. Last November, in response, online PC games store GOG announced a Preservation Program, where over 100 games are promised ongoing support to be sold and run on modern machines forever. It was announced last night that the beloved Silent Hill 4: The Room, best PC game of all time Deus Ex, and original FEAR would be among 20 new games joining the scheme. And the rest of the names aren’t small, either.

In February, when one of the scourges of preservation, Warner Bros. (a company that shelves finished movies such that they may never be seen by anyone, while deleting vast archives of classic animations from its streaming services, alongside closing down game studios that have created some of the best games of recent times), GOG reacted to the news of the closure of Monolith with an announcement that it will attempt to save as many of the studio’s games as it’s able via the Preservation Program. The first of these, FEAR, is now in.

Meanwhile, 2004’s Silent Hill 4 has joined the program with the addition of “restored scenes that were never available on PC before,” according to a press release from GOG. This includes missing “hauntings,” the strange events that occur, which GOG found were in the PC code but never included—their engineers have dug them out and got them working.

Alongside those two headliners are some other classic games that could easily merit the same moniker. Stone-cold classics like Deus Ex, Fallout 2, Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption, Alone In The Dark 1 to 3, and all eight original Ultima games are also now included, meaning they will be constantly maintained to work on modern PCs for as long as GOG exists (and, the company told me, it has plans in place to ensure preservation can continue if it was to go away). Oh, and Crystal Dynamic’s first three Tomb Raiders.

Here’s the full list of new additions. It’s worth noting most of these are currently at least 75 percent off in GOG’s current sale:

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