GOG gives long-lost Blade Runner adventure game a new lease on life

There are a ton of games that are released each year, and many of them wind up falling into obscurity as time goes on. Some of those games that fade into the ether don't always deserve to though, and thankfully, digital distribution can give those games a new lease on life. Still, there are always some that fall through the cracks, such as 1997's Blade Runner adventure game for PC.

Made by Westwood Studios, Blade Runner was met with warm reception and solid sales when it released, so it seems like it would be the perfect game to re-release digitally. That's finally happening today on GOG, which begs the question, "what took so long?"

The story behind this release is a fascinating one. As detailed by the GOG team in a blog post today, the reason we haven't seen a digital Blade Runner release until now is down to a combination of factors. The first is that Westwood Studios was shut down in 2003, but even if it were still running today, there's also the fact that the source code for the game was lost during one of the studio's move complicating matters further.

Because of that missing source code, this digital version of Blade Runner is definitely the final product of a labor of love. GOG says that a collection of programmers spent a whopping 8 years trying to piece together the code from Blade Runner's four CD retail release. Alcon Interactive Group and GOG helped the project further, leading us to today, with a digital version of Blade Runner that should run fine on modern machines and, as always, is being offered DRM-free.

You can find Blade Runner on GOG for $9.99, but for launch, it's been discounted by 10% to bring the price down to $8.99. If you're a fan of point-and-click adventure games, it sounds like this could be well worth checking out.