SNEG is a small publisher with the main goal of rescuing abandonware, bringing them back to modern platforms and tweaking them to work with modern control systems.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term abandonware, it is a label given to a game that has been abandoned by its developer and publishing team. These games usually are not available to purchase and are usually found for free through specific communities trying to keep the game alive. Because these games have been abandoned, they have no support to make them compatible with modern platforms, so they are lost to the realms of the small corners of the internet.
This is where SNEG comes in, giving these games the support they need to get them more widely available. SNEG are run by former GOG employees, and they have been preserving games since 2020. I caught up with co-founder Artem Shchuiko to find out more on the company, their vision, the work that goes into preserving a game and much more.
Can you give a little introduction to yourself and the role you play at SNEG?
I’m Artem Shchuiko, co-founder of SNEG. I handle the full cycle: finding the games, negotiating and signing the rights, then producing some of them myself. Aside from simply enjoying the ride, staying hands-on keeps me attuned to what players actually want and makes me keep asking what more we can do for them. Before SNEG I spent around seven years at GOG.com, first reviving classic games, later building out the GOG Galaxy ecosystem.
Can you tell us a little about SNEG, its mission and why you set it up?
SNEG started with a simple idea: bringing classic games back to modern players. There are thousands of great games that, for one reason or another, are no longer legally available. Some disappeared because of rights issues, some because of technical problems, and others were simply forgotten over time. We decided to deal with the most complicated cases where others failed.
Today, our mission has evolved beyond simply re-releasing old titles. We want to keep classic gaming experiences alive and relevant for the people who grew up with them, for players discovering them for the first time, and hopefully for developers who might be inspired by the ideas, mechanics, and creativity behind them. Every game we bring back is another piece of gaming history that gets a chance to live on.
How do you decide on which games to attempt preserving?
It really starts with the fact that we’re gamers ourselves. We grew up playing hundreds of games, and, like everyone else, we have our own wish list of titles we’d love to see back. Sometimes those dreams overlap with what the community has been asking for over the years, and that’s usually a very good sign.
Of course, we also look at games that were iconic for their time, helped define a genre, or simply built a dedicated following that is still there many years later. And after spending so much time in the industry, we’ve also learned a lot of fascinating stories around certain games and the people who made them. Sometimes the story itself is enough to make us think: this one really deserves another chance.
If you look at some of the games we’ve announced recently, Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor is a good example. It carries the legacy of an iconic D&D series and had all the ingredients to become a strong tactical CRPG, but its original launch was overshadowed by serious technical issues, including the infamous uninstaller bug.
Dark Earth is another one. It was so unique and successful in Europe that it even inspired a tabletop RPG, and the rights for a movie adaptation were sold, although the film unfortunately never happened.
And Ecstatica still has a dedicated following today. It’s remembered as one of the strangest and most sarcastic horror adventures of its era, and technically it was also very unusual, using voxel-based characters to create its distinctive look.
So there is no magic formula. Sometimes it’s nostalgia, sometimes historical importance, sometimes the community, and sometimes it’s simply a great story behind a game that makes us want to bring it back.
Screenshot: Dark Earth
Have you had any issues with gaining licences to games that you are interested in preserving?
Absolutely. I’d say licensing is usually the biggest challenge, much bigger than the technical work. We’ve become quite comfortable working without source code, but if you don’t have the legal right to bring a game back, there’s simply nothing you can do.
Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor is a good example. Before any technical work could even begin, we had to make sure three different parties were aligned – Ubisoft, Stormfront Studios, and Wizards of the Coast. Years passed between the first conversations and the moment we could actually start working on the game.
Ecstatica was different. The rights had reverted to Andrew Spencer, the original creator, so the challenge was less about a complicated chain of ownership and more about building trust. When we first contacted him, we were essentially an unknown company asking to work with something very personal to him. We had to show that we genuinely understood the game, that we cared about it, and that we would still be there a year later.
So yes, we’ve definitely had licensing challenges. Sometimes it’s about identifying the right owner, sometimes about aligning several parties, and sometimes simply about earning enough trust to move forward. And in some cases, the rights are still stuck in legal limbo. That’s why patience is probably one of the most important skills in game preservation.
What is your preservation outlook? Are you just updating the game’s controls, or is there more work needed in the back end of the game?
For us, preservation is much more than making a game launch on a modern PC or adding controller support. Compatibility is only the first step.
Our goal is to preserve the original experience while removing the barriers that prevent people from enjoying it today. That means fixing crashes, compatibility issues, serious bugs, and sometimes improving the UX/UI where it clearly gets in the way of the original design.
At the same time, we’re very careful not to change what made the game special in the first place. We don’t want players to feel like they’re playing a different game. Whenever we’re unsure where that line is, we spend a lot of time listening to the community, reading old forums and reviews, and talking to people who know the game far better than we do.
We would love to give players the opportunity to experience games as closely as possible to what the original developers envisioned, just without the technical barriers that have appeared over the last 20 or 30 years.
What is the process of the preservation that you carry out?
It usually starts long before we write a single line of code. First, we have to identify the rights holders, understand the chain of ownership, and acquire the rights or license them. Sometimes that takes a few weeks, sometimes a few years.
Once the legal side is in place, we research the game itself. We gather everything we can find – old builds, manuals, source materials if they still exist, interviews with the original developers, and years of community feedback from forums, Reddit, and reviews. We want to understand not only how the game works but also how players remember it.
Only then do we move to the technical side. Sometimes it’s about compatibility, sometimes reverse engineering because the source code is gone, and sometimes fixing bugs or improving the UX/UI while staying true to the original experience.
Finally, there is a lot of QA.
Screenshot: Pool of Radiance
Do you ever make any visual tweaks to the games or add any extras?
That’s a broad question because every game is different, and many elements might fall under the “visual” improvements.
We always try to improve the experience where it makes sense without changing the identity of the game. For example, we almost always aim to add native widescreen support, as most classic PC games were designed for 4:3 monitors. From the recent releases, we did that for Warhammer: Dark Omen. In some cases, that’s simply not possible because of the way the game was originally designed.
For other titles, we upscale textures or other graphical assets where it improves the overall presentation. Blade of Darkness is a good example of that. And sometimes the work goes much deeper. On games like Ecstatica or Dark Earth, we’re effectively rewriting the renderer to support modern resolutions while preserving the original visual style.
As for extras, we always try to include as much original content as possible, subject to the necessary legal permissions. That can include expansion or mission packs, manuals, maps, soundtracks and other bonus materials that help players experience the game as completely as possible.
Has any game been a challenge to port over?
Almost every game presents a different challenge. Some because the source code has been lost and others because of unique technology that nobody has touched for 20 or 30 years. For example, one of the games we brought back was written in the Delphi language, and there are not so many people who use it nowadays. That’s actually one of the most enjoyable parts of the job; every project teaches us something new.
Do you have a particular favourite game that you’ve worked on so far?
As a project, willing Captain Blood back into existence despite its unfortunate fate and finally giving it the release it was owed is probably my current favourite. But as a gamer, I always come back to Blade of Darkness (aka Severance: Blade of Darkness). I have very fond memories of it from when I was a teenager, and there is something surreal about being associated with it now.
Can you tell us a little about the Warhammer initiative project you carried out and what lessons you learned from it?
The Warhammer Classics label launch was one of our biggest preservation projects to date. We brought back ten classic Warhammer games at once, making them available on modern digital platforms with improved compatibility and quality-of-life features where it made sense. It was also a great opportunity to work on this amazing IP, so naturally there were a lot of expectations from the community.
I think the biggest lesson we learned was that players are very comfortable with thoughtful improvements, as long as the original game remains the same. We deliberately kept the original gameplay and design decisions intact while focusing on compatibility, stability, usability, and other quality-of-life features. The response confirmed that this is the right direction for us.
On a more practical level, releasing ten games simultaneously was… ambitious. Every game comes with its own technical and production challenges, so doing all of them at once definitely kept us busy. It also taught us a lot about planning and prioritisation, lessons that we’re now applying to all the upcoming projects.
Screenshot: Soilders at War
Do you have any dream titles that you’d love to preserve that seem a little out of reach right now?
Oh, absolutely. 🙂 Every gamer has their own wish list, and we’re no different.
The first games that come to my mind are No One Lives Forever, The Neverhood and the classic MechWarrior series. They’re all games I’d personally love to see legally available again.
Some of them are certainly more difficult than others because of rights or other legal challenges. But we’ve learned not to say “never”. A few of the projects we’ve announced recently also looked almost impossible when we first started the conversations, and yet here we are. So I wouldn’t say they’re out of reach. I’d simply say they’re projects that may take a little more patience.
What’s next for SNEG, and which future titles should we be keeping an eye out for?
The short answer is – more classics. 🙂
Right now, we’re fully focused on delivering the games we’ve already announced. Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, Dark Earth, Ecstatica 1 & 2, Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria, and Soldiers at War are keeping us very busy, and we’re looking forward to sharing more about each of them as development progresses.
At the same time, we’re constantly talking to rights holders and looking for the next games to bring back. Some of those conversations have only just started, while others have been going on for years. Hopefully, we’ll have a few more exciting announcements to share before too long.
If anyone wants to keep up to date on your work and announcements, where is best to go?
That’s a good question.
Until now, we’ve always put the games themselves first, and as a result, we’ve almost completely ignored social media – we haven’t even created a proper website yet. 🙂 But based on the feedback and requests from the community, we definitely want to change that by the end of this year.
In the meantime, we’d really appreciate it if you could follow our Steam Publisher page. That’s currently the best place to keep up with our releases and announcements:
