Blade Runner Revived and now re-released on GOG

The original Blade Runner game from 1997 was practically no longer available for a while, but will be available again on Tuesday via the GOG platform. It took the platform eight years to reconstruct the game.

The game tells a detective story that takes place in parallel with the original film from 1982. The player is a new character Ray McCoy - a blade runner from the Los Angeles police - who is hunting for 'replicants', a kind of genetically engineered fake people. The game chose at random which characters were 'replicants' and which were not, so the game had a different ending each time.

Blade Runner was created by Westwood, the studio that is best known for the Command & Conquer series, and was especially praised for the atmosphere in the game that was very similar to the atmosphere in the film. After the release in 1997, 800,000 copies of the game were sold. Still, the game was hard to find. Until recently, the chances of a digital re-release seemed very small. The original source code of the game was lost in 2003 during a move.

GOG explains on its own website that a team of programmers worked together for eight years to reconstruct the game through physical disks. They used a ScummVM program, which was previously used to reconstruct classic LucasArts adventure games. The game from GOG can be downloaded for just 9 USD and is DRM free.