Finally! GOG.com Finally Adds Linux Game Support, Finally

Well… it’s about damn time. One of the most-requested features that GOG fans have had for its developers was Linux support, and after going so long without it, I was starting to think it’d never happen. But, here it is. Apparently, GOG’s kept no secret about its forthcoming Linux support; I just happened to not see it, making this a rather big surprise.

Flatout 2 – Now Available for Linux

To better understand where GOG’s come from regarding Linux support, it relays an explanation:

Last year the GOG.com team was somewhat adamant that it wouldn’t be able to bring Linux games to its community. “The architecture of Linux with many common distros, each of them updating fairly often, makes it incredibly challenging for any digital distribution company to be able to properly test the game in question, and then provide support for the release–all of which our users are accustomed to,” it was said.

That all turned out to be total bologna… baloney? That’s a dumb word. It was true at the time, of course, but then in March this year, the team announced that it would, indeed, start working on bringing Linux games to GOG.com. Just another instance of the community really getting behind something — Linux support, in this case — and the team working hard to get it done.

Fair enough, GOG. What makes this delay easier to accept is that this isn’t a simple “Supports Linux” launch – there are a number of games that GOG itself has ported to the OS. Yes – that means that some games are now available on Linux for the first time. These include:

• Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold
• Blake Stone: Planet Strike
• Bloodnet
• CLARC
• Darklands
• Dragonsphere
• Flatout
• Flatout 2
• Fragile Allegiance
• Hocus Pocus
• Litil Divil
• Normality
• Pinball Gold Pack
• Pinball World
• Pirates! Gold Plus
• Realms of the Haunting
• Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender
• Rise of the Triad: Dark War
• Sid Meier’s Colonization
• Sid Meier’s Covert Action
• Slipstream 5000
• Stargunner
• Sword of the Samurai

That is one heck of an impressive list. Even if a lot of these games would have run through something like DOSBox or Wine, to have them officially supported is fantastic. Also – I had no idea that the service had the classic platformer Hocus Pocus; I must pick that one up!

For each of its Linux-supported games, GOG supplies both a .deb for Ubuntu/Debian use, and tarball archive for all other distros. If for some reason one of those pre-packaged games doesn’t work in your distro of choice, you can be sure that some guide will exist on the site to help you remedy that.

Overall, a great launch from GOG. It’s a big relief to finally, finally see the big Tux on the site.