Thursday, 28 Sep 2023

You can finally play Blade Runner again

Blade Runner is considered one of the best adventure games ever made, but it was also one that remained unplayable for some time — but that’s no longer the case.

Based on Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, which itself is based off of Phillip K. Dick’s story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner — the game — sold more than 800,000 copies, according to GOG, but the source code was lost when developer Westwood Studios moved offices. If you had the four original disks from the 1997 release, you could technically play it on your modern PC, but it gave plenty of players trouble.

This year, a group of fans got the game working on modern PCs with a program called ScummVM. You still needed the original disks, but ScummVM forced the files to run in a stable environment on modern computers. A developer involved in getting Blade Runner working again in ScummVM told VICE this year that sections of the game were written in a way that made them “too fast” to run on modern PCs — and that caused problems even for people with the original disks.

The team spent eight years getting Blade Runner ready and on ScummVM.

But now, anyone can play Blade Runner, thanks to those coders, Alcon Interactive Group (the production company behind Blade Runner 2049), and GOG. Blade Runner has been re-released with a digital, DRM-free version 22 years after its original release date.

Blade Runner is on sale for $8.99 on GOG now. After Jan. 2, the price will go back up to $9.99.

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