Forever Physical: In a world where gaming giants are actively trying to kill optical discs and other physical media, GOG is doing its own thing. The retro gaming store is expanding its dedicated preservation efforts, giving customers a new way to enjoy their growing collection of digital purchases.
GOG recently announced the addition of a few more titles to its Preservation Program, which was introduced to improve support for some classic games sold on the store. The program is now welcoming five new titles, which also come with their own interactive 3D boxes scanned from original packaging.
GOG's new wave of Preservation Program titles includes Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Armikrog, Descent, Hitman: Codename 47, and Myst. The five corresponding 3D dioramas were created after scanning the front, back, spine, and all the additional elements of the original boxes. GOG chose the GLB format to share the interactive 3D objects, which should be easy to view with native 3D viewers available on both Windows and macOS.
Furthermore, GOG entered into a partnership with Big Box Collection to offer flat, printable versions of the aforementioned 3D box art. Ideally, users should be able to print, cut, fold, and glue all the art's elements together to create their own game box replicas. Big Box Collection is a "one-man show" started by a fan of boxed games in 2015. It now offers 3D replicas of around 890 physical games released on PC and other platforms.
As highlighted in GOG's announcement, game boxes can be affected by the same durability and reliability issues that make optical discs, floppy disks, and other physical media so difficult to preserve. Providing printable scans of the original boxes should help game preservation from a different angle, pleasing people interested in "owning" fully tangible replicas of their favorite titles.
In fact, there is a whole community on the GOG forums that has been striving to add a "boxed" layer to the store's digital offering since 2008. People have been designing custom "DVD covers" for GOG games for years, and the store is now contributing to this effort with its own "official" selection of printable boxes.
In 2025, I spent hundreds of euros on a brand-new Epson EcoTank ET-8500 printer just to bring my GOG collection to the shelves.
The GOG Preservation Program launched a couple of years ago to ensure that classic games would remain playable on modern systems even after their original developers had abandoned them. GOG is adding its own tweaks, mods, and compatibility improvements to the original releases. GOG has not provided any information about plans to add even more 3D and printable boxes for some of these "preserved" games.