GOG’s Preservation Program Is the Only Corporate Answer to Classic PC Gaming in 2026
I want to try something. Pick a PC game you played in the 90s. Not one of the famous ones: not Doom, not Myst, not StarCraft. Pick something from the middle of the shelf. Something you remember but haven’t thought about in fifteen years. A game your friend had at their house, or one you found in the bargain bin at CompUSA, or something that came bundled with your family’s Packard Bell.
Now go buy it. Legally. Right now. A working copy that runs on your current machine.
The Video Game History Foundation did a version of this exercise in 2023, except they did it across 4,000 titles released before 2010. The number they came back with was 87 percent. That’s how many classic video games have zero commercial availability. Not limited availability. Zero. You cannot buy them from anyone at any price through any legitimate channel. The Foundation put that number in context by comparing it to other categories of cultural loss: American silent films survive at about 14 percent, pre-World War II audio recordings at roughly 10 percent. Classic video games sit at 13 percent. We’ve already decided those other numbers represent cultural tragedies. Games are right there with them and most people have no idea.
That’s the backdrop. The community, volunteers, preservationists, projects like eXoDOS and MAME and the Internet Archive, has been doing the actual work of keeping these games alive for decades now. But in the corporate world, the world of storefronts and quarterly earnings and shareholders, exactly one company is trying.
What GOG Is Actually Doing
GOG launched their Preservation Program in November 2024 with 100 games. The pitch was straightforward: take classic titles, actively maintain them for modern hardware and operating systems, ship them DRM-free, and commit to keeping them working indefinitely. Not “sell them and hope for the best.” Actively maintain them. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.
As of their February 20th update this year, the program has grown to roughly 277 games with over 1,461 individual preservation improvements delivered across the catalog. The February batch brought in The Wolf Among Us, The Last Express, Eric the Unready, the Police Quest Collection, Space Quest 1 through 3, and a handful of other titles. January added four Final Fantasy games: III and IV as 3D remakes, VIII Remastered, and IX. The marquee titles in the broader program include the original Fallout games, Diablo with Hellfire, Heroes of Might and Magic III, System Shock 2, the first three Resident Evil games, Dragon Age: Origins, and SWAT 4.
The technical backbone is a DirectX wrapper that GOG has been developing for over fifteen years. It translates legacy DirectX calls into something modern GPUs can actually process, and it’s the engine behind most of the compatibility work in the program. That’s not a trivial piece of engineering. Fifteen years of iteration on a compatibility layer means they’ve encountered and solved problems that nobody else in the commercial space has even attempted.
They also made a move in December 2024 that deserves specific attention. When Blizzard pulled the original Warcraft and Warcraft II from the GOG store (delisted them entirely, no longer available for purchase), and GOG announced that any game in the Preservation Program would continue to receive compatibility maintenance even after delisting. If you bought it, you keep it, and they keep fixing it. That policy exists because Blizzard forced the question, and GOG answered it in the direction that favors the customer. I don’t think most people noticed when it happened, but it’s one of the more consumer-friendly policies in digital distribution right now.
And then there’s GOG Patrons. Launched around October 2025, it’s a $5-a-month optional subscription that funds preservation work directly. You get a patron-only Discord server, your name credited on Preservation Program game pages, and a profile badge. That’s it. No games included. No changes to how GOG works. Just a way to throw money at the problem if you think the problem is worth solving. I find something refreshingly honest about a company saying “this costs money and we’d like help paying for it” instead of wrapping it in a subscription bundle with nine things you didn’t ask for.
GOG won the Checkpoint Award for Advocate of Accessibility and Preservation in November 2025 in Rome. Their senior PR manager got elected Vice President for Communications on the EFGAMP board, that’s the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects, which is the kind of organization name that tells you exactly how niche this space is. They’ve got a panel at GDC 2026 in March called “What’s New in Game History: 2026” with speakers from NYU, the Video Game History Foundation, the Internet Archive, and PC Gamer. They’re putting institutional weight behind this.
So far this all sounds great. And honestly, a lot of it is great. But.
The Part Where It Gets Complicated
There’s a thread on the GOG forums titled “Stop this madness, Preservation Program is killing games!” and it’s not a troll post. It’s people who bought games that worked fine, watched GOG push a Preservation Program update, and then had the game break.
Dragon Age: Origins is the example that keeps coming up. GOG pushed a preservation update that broke the core-limiting fix the game depended on, introduced mod incompatibilities, and according to multiple forum users the issues persisted for over four months before being addressed. F.E.A.R. started stuttering and crashing after its update. The Witcher got frame drops. Fallout 2 had resolution options removed. These aren’t obscure titles; these are the flagship games in the program.
The structural problem underneath the complaints is real. GOG Galaxy, their optional client, lets you roll back to a previous version if an update breaks something. But if you use offline installers instead of Galaxy, which a lot of GOG’s core audience does specifically because the whole point of DRM-free is not needing a client, you can’t roll back. The pre-update installer is gone. You’re stuck with whatever they shipped. And Galaxy doesn’t have a Linux-native client, so Steam Deck users and Linux gamers, a growing chunk of the PC gaming audience, are in the same boat.
There’s also a valid criticism from the VOGONS community that GOG’s preservation isn’t really preservation in the archival sense. They’re shipping wrapped, modified versions of games optimized for modern systems. The original binaries, the original installers, the games as they actually shipped in 1996: those aren’t included. If you want to study how a game was originally built, or run it on period-accurate hardware through something like 86Box, GOG’s version isn’t what you need. The VOGONS crowd has been asking for years for GOG to include original ISOs as an optional extra alongside the modernized build. Hasn’t happened.
None of this erases what GOG is doing right. But it’s worth being honest about the gap between the pitch and the execution. Preservation means the game keeps working. If your update process sometimes makes the game stop working, that’s a problem you have to own.
Steam Isn’t Even in the Conversation
I keep seeing people compare GOG’s preservation efforts to Steam. There’s nothing to compare. Steam does not have a preservation program. Steam does not maintain classic games for compatibility. If the developer who published a game on Steam in 2004 no longer exists as a company (and a lot of them don’t), that game sits on Steam in whatever state it was last updated to, and if a Windows update breaks it, nobody at Valve is going to fix it.
GOG’s own business development team has been pretty blunt about this. Their senior manager told Game Developer magazine, and I’m quoting directly here: “There is no way in heaven that Steam will spend resources fixing other people’s games.” He’s right. That’s not what Steam is. Steam is a marketplace with an enormous catalog and a hands-off approach to maintenance. It works brilliantly for current titles where the developer is active. It works terribly for anything older than about 2012 where the original team has moved on.
The community fills that gap on Steam through PCGamingWiki, a volunteer-maintained wiki with fixes and workarounds for basically every PC game ever released, and through community patches, unofficial fan fixes, and compatibility tools. Proton helps on the Linux side. But none of that is Steam doing anything. That’s the community doing Steam’s job for free, and Steam taking a 30 percent cut on the sales.
Epic has an even smaller classic game footprint. Their Retro and Classic Games category exists but the selection is thin, and there’s no preservation commitment attached to any of it. Antstream Arcade offers about a thousand retro games through a streaming service that Epic integrated, but streaming retro games introduces latency that defeats the purpose for anything timing-sensitive, and the catalog skews heavily toward console and arcade titles rather than PC games.
So when I say GOG is the only corporate answer to classic PC gaming, I mean it literally. They are the only company with a storefront, a payroll, and a business model spending real money and engineering time on making old PC games work on new hardware. The community has been doing this kind of work since the late 90s (MAME, eXoDOS, the preservation underground), but GOG is the only entity doing it from inside the industry, with licensing deals and publisher relationships and an explicit policy commitment to keep doing it. You can criticize the execution (and you should, because that’s how it gets better), but among the companies that could be doing this and aren’t, GOG stands alone as the one that actually showed up.
The Paths That Exist Outside the Store
Commercial storefronts are one way to play classic PC games. They are not the only way, and for the vast majority of titles that ever existed, they’re not even an option.
The eXoDOS project maintains 7,666 pre-configured DOS games with the right emulator settings already dialed in per title. eXoWin3x covers 1,138 Windows 3.x titles. eXoWin9x handles 662 Windows 95/98 games. eXoScummVM wraps 671 adventure games. One anonymous volunteer and a rotating crew of about 10 to 20 helpers built all of that. The scope dwarfs anything commercial. GOG’s 277 preserved games represent real work, but eXo’s collection is thirty times that size on the DOS side alone, and every single title is pre-configured and playable out of the box through LaunchBox.
The Internet Archive hosts thousands of DOS games playable directly in your browser through JavaScript-based emulation. No download, no setup, no configuration. You click and play. The emulation quality isn’t as good as running DOSBox locally; there’s input lag, save states are limited, and the browser environment constrains what’s possible. But for a quick session with something you haven’t played in twenty years, it’s hard to beat the convenience. Archive.org is also hosting eXoDOS v5 as a distributed backup, which is the kind of institutional redundancy that matters when you’re talking about long-term preservation.
PCGamingWiki is the resource that ties everything together regardless of where you bought the game. Community-maintained fix documentation for essentially every PC game ever released. Widescreen patches, frame rate fixes, modern OS workarounds, links to community patches and unofficial updates. If you own a classic game on any platform and it doesn’t work, PCGamingWiki is the first place to check. The people maintaining it don’t get paid either.
And then there’s the emulation path: DOSBox-X for DOS and early Windows titles with minimal setup, 86Box for hardware-accurate full system emulation when you need the real thing. I wrote a full breakdown of those two tools already and I won’t repeat it here, but the short version is that DOSBox-X handles 99 percent of DOS gaming with zero configuration, and 86Box is what you need when Windows 95/98 accuracy matters.
277 Versus 87 Percent
Here’s the tension that sits underneath all of this, and I don’t think there’s a clean resolution to it.
GOG has preserved 277 games through their program. That’s real. Those games work, they’re maintained, and they’re DRM-free. But the Video Game History Foundation says 87 percent of classic games have no commercial availability at all. Even if you count GOG’s entire catalog, thousands of titles beyond just the Preservation Program, the math doesn’t come close to covering the gap. Commercial preservation is structurally constrained by licensing, rights negotiations, and market viability. A game that only 8,000 people worldwide want to play isn’t getting a GOG release. The economics don’t justify it.
Community preservation doesn’t have that constraint. eXo preserved 7,666 DOS games because he decided all of them mattered, not just the ones with a viable customer base. MAME has documented over 32,000 systems across 29 years of volunteer work because the mission was to preserve the hardware knowledge before it disappeared, regardless of whether anyone was going to pay for it. The Internet Archive hosts everything it can get its hands on because that’s what libraries do.
The legal situation makes this more complicated than it needs to be. The US Copyright Office rejected a DMCA exemption petition in October 2024 that would have allowed libraries and archives to provide remote digital access to out-of-print games. The exemption the VGHF and Software Preservation Network had been pursuing since 2021, across three triennial review cycles, got shot down because the ESA argued it could become a free online arcade. What did get granted was narrow enough to be almost useless: preservation institutions can circumvent copy protection on games where they legally possess both the server code and the local code, but only for on-premises access. You have to physically go to the library. In 2026. To play a DOS game.
So the institutional path has a legal ceiling. The commercial path has an economic ceiling. And the community path, the one that actually covers the full scope of what needs preserving, operates in a legal gray area that everybody quietly tolerates because the alternative is letting the games disappear.
Where This Actually Leaves You
If you want to play a classic PC game in 2026 and you want to do it the straightforward way, check GOG first. If they have it, buy it there. It will probably work. If an update breaks it and you’re on Galaxy, you can roll back. The Preservation Program means someone is actively maintaining it, which is more than you’ll get anywhere else in the commercial space. Support the Patrons program if you think the work matters. Five dollars a month to fund game preservation is a reasonable ask.
If GOG doesn’t have what you’re looking for (and statistically, they probably don’t), then your options fan out. PCGamingWiki for fixes if you found it somewhere else. The Internet Archive for browser-based play if you just want a quick session. DOSBox-X or 86Box if you want to run it locally with proper emulation. And the eXo collections if you want the most comprehensive pre-configured library of classic PC games that exists anywhere, built by volunteers who decided the whole catalog deserved to survive.
GOG is doing something nobody else in the industry will do, and they deserve credit for that even when the execution stumbles. But the honest picture of classic PC game preservation in 2026 is that one corporation is maintaining 277 games, and a community of unpaid volunteers has been maintaining everything else for years before GOG even started their program. The gap between those two numbers is the gap between what the market will support and what actually needs to happen. The community figured that out a long time ago.
GDC 2026 has that panel in March. “What’s New in Game History: 2026.” Speakers from NYU, the Video Game History Foundation, the Internet Archive, PC Gamer. The conversation is happening in rooms where industry decisions get made. Whether it leads to anything beyond another panel next year is the question none of us can answer yet.
In the meantime, the games are out there. The tools work. The community hasn’t stopped. If you’ve got a title sitting in your memory that you haven’t played in two decades, this is probably the best it’s ever been for actually finding it and getting it running. Start with GOG. End up wherever the search takes you.
Sources:
Published on Kyle’s Geek Den | February 2026
