5 years after it was yanked off stores, GOG's bringing underrated spy RPG Alpha Protocol in from the cold with fewer crashes and new achievements

Good news for those of still fighting the good fight, still holding aloft the proud banner of truth and justice, still committed to struggle for what's right instead of what's simply popular. Five years after it was unceremoniously yanked from sale, Alpha Protocol is back via GOG.

If you're of stout heart and righteous spirit, you'll already know that Alpha Protocol is a straight-up banger, an Obsidian RPG set in the high-stakes world of modern international espionage rather than a more familiar fantasy or sci-fi setting. Yes, okay, it was deeply flawed—the game was either a cakewalk or surreally difficult depending on which skills you chose to specialise in—but it made up for it with a robust system of choice and consequence: How you chose to behave really mattered in a way few games have managed since.

But thrilled as I am that Alpha Protocol is finally back in stores (or one store, anyway), it's not all that's going on here. In a chat with GOG's Zuzanna Rybacka, the company told me it considered Alpha Protocol a key part of the process of «going back to the roots: the good old games.»

GOG announced it was returning to its roots as the internet's premier destination for DRM-free stone-cold classics back in 2022, but I get the impression that CD Projekt is keen to start ramping that return up now that Alpha Protocol's «very long release» (the company told me bringing the game back to life has taken longer than usual: around half a year) has hit its climax.

Rybacka told me that GOG was, naturally, incredibly excited to have titans like Sony releasing modern blockbusters on the platform, but that a proliferation of modern titles had «kind of lost this whole 'Good Old Games' vibe.» So the store is «going back to our core, to bringing back classics… basically, our point [is] to not let all those games that would go to perish, and make them accessible for younger generations.»

Which means the zoomers can finally experience the magnificent joy that is Alpha Protocol's