There hasn’t been a lot of good news out of EA lately, but here’s some: the company just launched a bunch of classic games on Steam. The new (old) releases include nine games in total, spanning franchises like Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and SimCity.
I'm sure most of them have already been available on GoG for quite some time, I don't know what took them so long to port them over competing storefronts.
Maybe they had an agreement with GOG? This is all personal speculation, but GOG was primarily known as Good Old (Ol'?) Games for a long time, as they would put that under their GOG acronym back in the day. It was essentially a storefront that primarily dealt with classics and keeping them available to consumers before they pivoted and started also focusing a lot on modern games. Maybe my memory is flawed and I'm completely misremembering the old GOG and they've always focused on modern games as well, so anyone feel free to correct me if that's the case.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if GOG struck a deal with a lot of publishers for selling all their classics exclusively. On the flip side, it could also be that the publishers just didn't care enough about their old offerings to put any effort into porting them into other storefronts. Now that retrogaming is much more ubiquitous than it once was, some bean counter pitched this idea in a mid-quarter profit seeking brainstorming meeting and here we are.
That’s a solid list of classics for Steam users, though it should be noted that most of these games — along with plenty of others like Wing Commander, Ultima, and Theme Park — are already available through the classic game service GOG. B
EA's launcher still requires internet access though, right? If so, you're probably better off sticking to the GOG versions. I booted up Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, and EA told me "no".
Maybe not. The disclaimers on the side of the store page appear to be different between these and some other EA games. I hate how hard it is these days to discern if a game has a stupid always-online requirement.
Looks like somebody is in need of cash 😂.
But to be fair, these games were back in the day mighty good. It's really a shame to see how both greed and ever growing ambitious killed creativity.
I'm OK with them wanting to keep making money from it as long as they update it for compatibility with newer operating systems. Selling something they have completely abandoned us not cool.
Same here, Sim City 3000 and The Sims were my jam and I still listen to their soundtracks every once in a while, they're so good. There was something truly magical about Maxis back then.
Populous The Beginning! I never played the other populous games but I have some very fond memories of this one. As a kid I just loved using spells to reshape the worlds and mess with the enemy AI. Dropping a volcano in the middle of their village and watching them go nuts was always so much fun.
Used to play the crap out of some Populous (all of them) was a great game. Not giving EA any money though. Just get them on GoG so you don't rent them.
This one and SimCopter took way more of my time than any of the other Sim games by a mile. I was especially surprised because SimCopter was full 3D and my old hardware could run it.
I don't know how well a remaster of either would sell, but I'd buy them. SimCopter could even be a mobile game at this point.
There is OpenRA. An open source engine to get those classic C&C games running on modern machines but it only supports C&C, Red Alert 1 and Dune 2000.
They are working on the next engine with Tiberian Sun currently under development.
If you're interested in Dungeon Keeper, I highly recommend a similar project called KeeperFX. Play the game on modern systems, in higher resolutions, with game fixes as well.