Is there any way to get an old installer for a game? I'm talking like 1.0.0. Sometimes I feel nostalgic (this is Good OLD Games) and want a buggy old vanilla copy of a game. And please no responses about file sharing, even if that may or may not be how I discovered GOG.com ;)

EDIT: Ah, I see you mean the old GOG installers, not the original ones...

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Unfortunately no.

I for one would love the original installation media of those old games. However this has been discussed a few times already here, and it seems that GOG will not be providing this in the forseeable future. This apparently might not be feasible for legal reasons. Plus, people would expect support for them on new machines, which GOG won't be able to provide.

I'm still hoping that some time GOG will be able to provide the original installers as an optional extra, without support.

It would be interesting to see them uploaded as an unsupported extra.

This is another one of those things that I wanted to find out about myself. What is going to happen if installers are updated so that they stop working on older OS?

Say after Windows 10 (or maybe 11) is released GOG must update many of the installers for compatibility, but that in turn breaks compatibility for Windows XP, 7 or 8.

Will there then be a new tab in the download options? e.g. instead of having Windows/Mac/Linux it will be Win7&8/Win10/Mac/Linux

A single installer could detect which Windows version it is running on and install or configure accordingly. Anyway, I guess that support for old Windows versions won't last forever, eventually it will have to be dropped.

It all depends on whether GOG wants to continue supporting XP. If they do, they will want to retain compatibility with XP, otherwise, they will kiss the XP support goodbye.

if that gets the job done then that's fine It's true, but you can cease updating products for the OS - I've no question about that.

However, I've always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that as long as GOG exists I will be able to download my games. If there comes a point where I don't have the installer for a game I bought, which was sold as compatible for my OS, and GOG have removed it so I can no longer download it, what then? I've paid for something I can no longer access, would that be entirely my fault for not having made adequate backups? or would GOG be at fault for arbitrarily withdrawing a service?

Should the old installers be archived somewhere so that they are available forever?

I'm using a 64-bit version of Windows 7 --and while newer versions of Windows may remove 32-bit compatibility (not sure if 10 does or not), I'm fairly confident they will have 'virtual machines' (i.e. SCUMM, DOSBox) up and running in short order on future platforms.

Now that I think about it, Microsoft could stop supporting an operating system at their own whim; however, when was the last time anyone who was somewhat adept at using computers and accessing Google ever needed to call Microsoft Support for their Operating System? I could just keep running Windows 7 --but I may not be able to use the latest "hardware" due to lack of drivers or play the latest game dependent on newer OS libraries.

I suppose this is what they call a "rate of change". :)

The only games you* want earlier versions of are games like Soldner which have some bugs created by the Little Baby Jesus himself. Yes, that's right Jesus came back in baby form and fucked with Soldner's code for a laugh. The results are outstanding. Soldner's bugs are the only real proof of the existence of God.



* any sane people reading this.

You could always try asking support if it's just for a game or two. I don't know if they would still have the original 1.0.0 installers though.

How about us insane ones, who like to have a Windows 98 machine around just for kicks and nostalgia? You have to think about us as well!

Nope, sorry. I requested some time ago the old installer of "Symphony", because it was an earlier version with a great exploit left in, but no such luck. If you own the game legit, though, i suppose it wouldn't be bad to get the old installer "somewhere else faraway from gog"... For example i found what i needed in my case elsewhere, but i have BOUGHT this game first before conjuring up the tentacles.

Thanks for all the responses. There are quite a few older games that were better unpatched. Warlords Battlecry 1.0 had no stat cap for any class. Clearly this was a balance issue, but interesting none the less. I'll just keep looking around, maybe GOG will do stuff. As far as methods that make grow tentacles, I already look like Dr. Octopus. I discovered GOG searching, somewhere, for a game I couldn't find for sale anywhere. Got a folder called GOG.com, and googled it. I have purchased every game in said folder from this site, because GOG rocks!

You're damn right! Just the other day I tried to run Doom on the Enigma Machine. Anything harder than Hurt Me Plenty is utterly impossible, I'm afraid.