You can now return to the world of 1997's Blade Runner, as it's up and restored on GOG

What a lovely day. Blade Runner, the iconic and absolute classic 1997 adventure game from Westwood Studios has returned online and it's now available to pick up DRM-free on GOG.

From what my contacts at GOG tell me, this has been done in cooperation with the ScummVM team. ScummVM only gained support for running Blade Runner properly in a recent release this year, so GOG have clearly jumped at the chance to get this into your hands. Good thing too, it's popular, now much easier to get and it's cross-platform too.

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Feature Highlight:

• Immerse yourself in the dark, gritty world of Los Angeles 2019, where you become both the hunter and the hunted.
• Explore over 100 interactive environments including sets from the Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie.
• Take part in a non-linear story that creates a unique experience every time you play.
• Interact with over 70 motion-captured characters, all with their own AI and agendas.
• Witness the climatic noir-style visuals, engulfed in smoke and rain.
• Recognize the Hollywood cast from the original film including Sean Young, James Hong, Joe Turkel, Brion James, and William Sanderson.
• Listen to the ambient, multi-track audio and hear the music which includes specially recreated cuts from the original Blade Runner soundtrack.
• Step into the role of detective Ray McCoy and utilize Blade Runner tools you know from the movie. Use ESPER photo analysis machine to distinguish replicants from humans, and analyze all case clues with the Knowledge Integration Assistant.

There's actually two modes available, the plain original Blade Runner plus a "restored content" mode that I've been told includes all sorts of animations, sound clips, dialogue and so on that were in the game files but not originally used. When you boot it up, it gives you a choice between them. Would have been nice if they tweaked the name though, as even on Linux the menu option says Windows which is a bit amusing (Note: The reason for that was clarified in the comments.).

On Manjaro I did need to install some extra SDL2 packages like "sdl2_net", and additionally since GOG package for Ubuntu the library name for "libfluidsynth.so.1" from FluidSynth did not match up. Creating a link between what it wants and what the Arch package has will make it work. Like so:

ln -s /usr/lib/libfluidsynth.so.2.3.0 /usr/lib/libfluidsynth.so.1

Note: You will likely need "sudo" for admin rights, to create the link. There's probably other ways around it but that's quick and works to get you going. You could also just use a local install of ScummVM instead of their provided package.

Once the above is done, it then seems to run quite nicely. Really incredible to see the community of hackers working on ScummVM continue supporting absolute classics, and GOG for giving them a legal and easy store.

Find Blade Runner on GOG now.