Thank God for GOG. If that isn’t the company’s slogan, it should be, as the Polish digital distribution company, in its crusade to free PC games from the idiocies of DRM, has made the retail CD keys of a number of beloved PC titles redeemable through their website.
Put simply, if you purchased a number of PC games physically, before the advent of Steam and GOG (You know, the ones that came on CDs or DVDs inside boxes, remember those?), you might suddenly find that, upon trying to reinstall them on your current PC, the games no longer worked for a variety of reasons. It could be unsupported DRM, incompatibilities with your OS, and other things that developers back in the 1990s and early 2000s could not possibly have foreseen.
This is especially true for games that used Gamespy DRM, as the company has since been shuttered and many games using their services have been left out in the cold.
In turn, GOG have made a number of these games available for redemption. All you’d have to do is enter the CD-keys of these old games on their site and you’d be given a free digital copy of them, DRM-free. At the moment, the redeemable games are:
Game editions released only in CIS & Russia territories:
- Mount & Blade: Warband
- Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword
- Eador: Genesis
Game editions released worldwide:
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
In a press release, GOG’s VP of Business Development and Operations Oleg Klapovsky said:
We have been fighting to free all games from DRM since the very beginning, and this new feature is the next step for us. It’s not a simple job, but we plan to bring in even more games in the future.
In a further update, the company has also added a Russian language version of the site, and is celebrating this addition with a “From Russian with Love” sale that drops massive discounts on over 30 Russian language games.
Finally, six new games have been introduced to GOG:
- Galactic Assault: Prisoner of Power (digital distribution exclusive)
- Sea Dogs (digital distribution exclusive)
- Wings of Prey Complete
- Pilot Brothers (-33%)
- Men of War™ (-50%)
- Death to Spies (-50%)