Good Old Games and Linux

Recently Liam Dawe posted a news item featuring a list of games available from GoG than can be made to work on Linux, either through native ports or through the use of emulators or similar solutions such as WINE or Dosbox.

[url="http://www.gamingonlinux.info/news.php?view=87"]http://www.gamingonlinux.info/news.php?view=87[/url]

This comes shortly after Good Old Games' marketing stunt, in which they pretended that they were forced to terminate the service and take the website down. In actuality they had simply taken it down as the service is now out of beta and they had to do some final revamping to the website. This has caused much confusion amongst some, and anger from others, but it has succeeded in bring up the topic of GOG and Linux again.

Frank Earl, a Linux developer and game porter whose work includes Caster and work on Ballistics, has been in discussion with GoG over the idea of shipping some of their products for Linux. Given the majority of the titles they sell for Windows run through the use of utilities such as Dosbox and ScummVM, it would be fairly simple just to take them and ship them with the Linux versions of these applications. I would like it if they also tried to gain rights to some of the native ports of these games, such as being able to dig up the rights to some of Loki Software's titles, but this might be too much to ask, though there are several games in their database such as Postal, Postal 2, Shogo, Kingpin, UT2003, UT2004, and the like where it would be easier to acquire the rights to sell them as native Linux versions.

At any rate, speaking at one of his frequent haunts, the Phoronix Forums, Earl has made a few comments about the current situation between himself and GoG. Also included is some references to some of his current projects, namely updates to Caster and his port of Cortex Command.

It's still an IDIOT thing they pulled there. They shouldn't have played it the way they did (Though they sort-of made up for part of it with the way they did the announcement...chuckle...)- and it leaves it open for concerns about them pulling similar stupid things down the line... Having said this, I think I'll work at getting in touch with them again after a few of the other projects get out or into full beta proper. (Yes, I've got an RC3 release of Caster (the previous two were boggled because I just hadn't fully set up right down at the Contract location yet...) and a Beta of Cortex Command to launch (and QUICKLY- go sign up for the beta. I need more than the four or so that've signed up so far for this test.).

I'll be talking with GoG and their parent CDProjeckt here shortly on the subject of their products probably in a month or so. I'm a bit busy with getting up to speed with a new job, making sure one beta finishes up smoothly (it was delayed because of the prior day-job) and making sure another takes off and is largely done in about 1-2 weeks' time. Once I get that off my plate, I'll be taking back up some leads I had and rattling some cages with some publishers and studios.

Finally, going back to the list that Liam posted earlier, several of the games mentioned have Linux native versions that were not mentioned. Rise of the Triad has a native source port and Kingpin had a native port created by a Xatrix Entertainment employee. Jagged Alliance 2 has both a full native source port as well as a commercial port from Tribsoft, as does Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which was one of Loki Software's titles and is currently being source ported by the VCMI project. So with the fullest respect to the guy behind that list, he could have looked a bit deeper at the subject than he did.