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Blade Runner: How GoG Resurrected an Old Game

BladeRunnerGog

It is 1997. Westwood Studios releases one of the best point-and-click adventure games of the year: Blade Runner. Inspired by the movie but following a parallel storyline. You take on the role of detective McCoy, tasked with investigating a series of disturbing animal murders linked to replicants. With a strong story, captivating cutscenes and simple gameplay, the point and click adventure from Westwood gained a lot of attention from critics.

Since the release of the game, more than two decades have passed and the game seemed to have been long forgotten. The ones that still had the original 3 disk version or the DVD release were no longer able to play it due to hardware compatibility issues.

Blade Runner Game on Gog

Many years have passed and fans of the franchise almost forgot about the game. The good folks at GoG seem to have managed to resurrect this classic title. According to GoG, releasing the game for modern PCs has been a challenging task. Their team worked on the release even before the second movie was launched back in 2017. The biggest issue was acquiring IP rights. Through some fortunate turn of events, GoG got in touch with Alcon Entertainment, the production company that worked on Blade Runner 2049. With their aid, GoG obtained interactive rights to allow them to re-release the game. Sadly, the original game code was lost.

Tasked with another challenge, GoG abandoned the idea of obtaining the original game code to resolve the hardware compatibility issues. The solution came from ScummVM. For the ones that are not aware, ScummVM emulates a virtual machine for the game to run on without any compatibility issues. After many hours of work, the 1997 Blade Runner game was resurrected in 2019, running on modern computers. Funnily enough, the story in the game takes place in 2019, a rather symbolic year since GoG managed to bring it back from the dead the same year.

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