As someone who dabbles in a bit of retrogaming, I find the whole concept of “abandonware” to be one of the more fascinating grey areas going. Abandonware, just in case you’re not acquainted with the term (and if you’re not, you must be new to the seedy underbelly of the intarnetz), refers to older software that’s no longer sold in stores, or supported by their publishers, or said publishers no longer exist, or anything along those lines.

It’s also, going by the strict letter of the law, just as illegal as pirating Spore or Call of Duty 4. Doesn’t matter if the game you want was released in 1981, 1991, 2001, or an hour ago. It’s still under copyright protection, meaning that distribution without the explicit consent of the copyright holder is, as they used to say when I was growing up in New England, “as wrong as sin on Sunday.”

Fortunately, some publishers are realizing that there is a demand for the older, unsupported titles in their back catalogs, and also that the same audience that wants these titles also doesn’t want to pay full price for them. To that end, they’ve made arrangements for their low-cost distribution through more modern avenues. You’ve almost certainly heard of Steam or GameFly by now, and of course there are all those retrogaming collections out there for the consoles. Personally, though, my favorite service so far, at least in their stated intent, looks to be GOG (“Good Old Games”), which will not only let you purchase a variety of older favorites at a more than reasonable price, but actually lets you re-download them should Murphy’s Law strike – without having to purchase it anew!

GOG isn’t officially open yet, but will be soon and I believe they are still taking beta testers. Like most “download-only” software stores, you select the title(s) you want from a catalog, feed it your payment info, and are then taken to the download link. The first thing I like here are the prices; everything is either $5.99 (US) or $9.99. And these aren’t just some lame titles that never sold well when they were on store shelves (though make no mistake, there are some games that fall into that category); there are some pretty strong titles here, from Descent to Fallout to Jagged Alliance 2 to MDK. There’s even an Earthworm Jim game! As of the beta stage, there are about 35 titles available in the GOG catalog, and I can only assume there are more on the way. Downloads include not only the essential game files themselves (including a proprietary, modern-OS aware installer program), but the original manuals and documentation (as PDFs) and an occasional extra or two, such as a soundtrack or image files. In the case of DOS games, GOG downloads include versions of DOSBox optimized for that specific game on your particular system (so there’s no need to tweak any settings, it Just Plain Works right out of the box).

But GOG isn’t just Steam for old games. The strongest selling point of the GOG service, and the reason why I’m even recommending it here, is the fact the downloads are DRM-free. No ugly StarForce or SecuROM nonsense here, to assume you’re a criminal just because you have a burner on your system! Even better is their decidedly consumer-friendly policy regarding your purchase; to paraphrase Chuck Woolery back in the early days of Wheel of Fortune, “once you buy a game it’s yours to keep.” Even if, for whatever reason, you’ve lost or deleted the original installation files for your GOG download, all you have to do is go back into your account and just hit the download link again. That’s right, you don’t have to repurchase the game if you lose that installer! You pay once for as many downloads/installations as you might need, and your account remembers it for the future. Not only is this a time- and money-saver, it also pretty much obviates any need to keep a bulky installation file on your HD (about the size of an Ubuntu ISO) or to even burn it off!

It’s still too early to tell how successful GOG will be – after all, it hasn’t even officially opened its doors yet! However, I can tell you that I like what I see so far. I’ve already purchased the first two Descent games this way, and they run as smooth as glass on my modern PC… even running the installer and DOSBox instance through Wine emulation on my Ubuntu box! No hassles at all, which is undeniably a good thing if you’re a fan of classic PC games but have moved on from Microsoft domination of your desktop; I imagine it would work just as well in XP and/or Vista.

Interested? Check out their site and keep an eye on it as it approaches “live” status. I have a good feeling about this one.

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