I received an email a few weeks back… which I lost somewhere because after nearly 40 years online I have too many email accounts… asking me to go look at the Dreamlist section over at GoG.com. Or maybe it was a pop-up in the GoG Galaxy app. Either way, it popped up, then I forgot about it, then Ars Technica wrote about it, which reminded me to bring it up.
Find the list today
GoG, once Good Old Games, is the digital store front dedicated to preserving and selling DRM-free copies of older titles. While it has delved into the new games market, delivering a DRM-free alternative there as well, their niche has always been keeping older titles alive.
That you can play the original Diablo is due to them.
Diablo at GoG.com
Last year when Battlefront.com was acquired and dropped support for all of its old titles, it was once again GoG was there for me with a copy of Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin.
It had been there waiting for me since 2019
My GoG library is maybe 10% the size of my Steam library, but I buy stuff there now and then including Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, relevant again as we witness the launch of a new title in the Civ series, and Total Annihilation, which I wrote about last month.
Anyway, I’m a bit of a fan, and especially of older titles that are not otherwise available, something that GoG is renewing their efforts around, and a central pillar of that is the Dreamlist.
You can go to the Dreamlist and add a title you want to see restored or vote for it if it has already been added. GoG uses the popularity of titles on the list to help drive its plans.
My current Dreamlist poster child is Civilization II Multiplayer Gold Edition, the final 1997 revision of the Civ II era of the franchise. It only has 162 votes, so go help it if you can.
Civ II – Dare to dream
I can actually play Civ II today on my modern Win11 PC. I have an image of the CD I still own and software to mount it (my PC no longer has a built-in optical drive) and a patch from Civ Fanatics that fixes a problem with it running on 64-bit operating systems.
Box, manual, disc, and chart
But that is a pretty tenuous position and hard to share with others. I would much prefer to have a DRM free supported option that is available from a place like GoG.
So I have put a link to the GoG Dreamlist at every spot in this post where I have used the word Dreamlist, so click on one of them and go check it out.