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I no longer want to play any game released prior to 2005, but you may feel differently. You may look at the Gold Box D&D games and think, ‘Yes, what I crave is hours upon hours of late-80s/early-90s CRPGs about dying in a sewer.’
If that is you, then good news: they’re coming to Steam on March 29th, with some spit and polish.
The Gold Box games are enormously influential, being based on classic D&D settings like Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and Dark Sun and helping to establish the early template for CRPGs. They are honestly hard to return to now, but these releases will be enhanced by companion apps, a unified launcher, improved DOSBox support, and a tool for transfering parties of characters between games.
The games will be released via eight collections, as follows:
- Forgotten Realms: The Archives Collection One (Eye of the Beholder I, II, and III)
- Forgotten Realms: The Archives – Collection Two (Curse of the Azure Bonds, Gateway to the Savage Frontier, Hillsfar, Pools of Darkness, Pool of Radiance, Secret of the Silver Blades, Treasures of the Savage Frontier, and Unlimited Adventures)
- Forgotten Realms: The Archives – Collection Three (Dungeon Hack, Menzoberranzan)
- Krynn series (Champions of Krynn, Death Knights of Krynn, The Dark Queen of Krynn)
- Dark Sun series (Shattered Lands, Wake of the Ravager)
- Ravenloft series (Strahd’s Possession, Stone Prophet)
- D&D Stronghold: Kingdom Simulator
- Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse
It sounds as if there are two companion apps, one for the Eye Of The Beholder series and one for all the others. They manage dungeon mapping for you, among other things.
All of the enhancements to these games are being handled by publisher SNEG, a company created by former developers at GOG. All of the above games are already available via GOG, in fact, and it’s not clear how the new versions will differ from previous releases. SNEG have previously brought a bunch of other classic games to Steam, too.
The Gold Box games will arrive on Steam on March 29th.