[STEAM] GOG veterans thank Microsoft and Windows 11 for finding "spectacular ways" to break classic games they're trying to preserve

[Steam 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Video game preservation is a constant uphill battle. Many games publishers don't

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

about it, making old tech work on new systems requires endless patience, and now

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. 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. "

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

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

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

"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

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

ships a preview."

"The further Windows travels from its roots, the more 30-year-old baggage it drags along," Obuchowski says. "And

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

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

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, 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

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

.

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.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

[/url]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up