In 2022, the famous Gold Box D&D games have finally arrived on Steam (opens in new tab). These games have been available on GOG for years, but the new Steam release has been updated to include pre-installed versions of the Gold Box Companion (opens in new tab) and All-Seeing Eye (opens in new tab) apps, making the older games The updates make older games more manageable on modern hardware. SNEG, the company that developed these updates, is about to do the same for eight D&D classics released long ago, including Spelljammer, DragonStrike, and Silver Box games.

The Silver Box games are not as well-known as the Gold Box lineage games, but as Jody explained in his excellent analysis of Steam's updates, it's all a bit arbitrary anyway.

"Not every game made with the Gold Box engine was released on Gold Box, and it depends on who you ask which games should count," he writes. SNEG's Gold Box Classics release on Steam (opens in new tab) bundle, for obvious reasons, does not include the 1991 online game, Spelljammer, or the two Buck Rogers games that were made with the engine but not released on Gold Box." Dark Sun, Ravenloft, the Eye of the Beholder series, Menzoberranzan, and Dungeon Hack are included, but none of them were given Gold Boxes and were not made with the engine."

Silver Box games are similarly confusing: while Wikipedia (open in new tab) lists Heroes of the Lance, Dragons of Flame, and Shadow Sorcerer, SNEG's Silver Box bundle includes War of the Lance is added to the list; the Wiki lists it as a "standalone game," probably because it is a top-down strategy game, not an RPG. However, Shadow Sorcerer also specializes in strategy, while Heroes of the Lance and Dragons of Flame are side-scrolling action games.

In any case, whatever you want to call them, collectively they represent an important slice of gaming history from the late 80s and early 90s. The full lineup is as follows: [DragonStrike is a "dragon combat simulator"; Spelljammer is like Sid Meier's Pirates, but it's a game about sailing through Wildspace instead of the high seas; Fantasy Empires is a Fantasy Empires is a strategy game, and Deathkeep is a first-person dungeon crawler. It is the newest of these, but "new" is relative: it was released in 1995.

"I am an old D&D fan and it has always been my dream to revive all its video game classics," said Oleg Krapovsky, director of SNEG." In 2015, I began to realize that dream by bringing back gold box titles to gamers." "And now we are continuing this dream by bringing back another part of the classics to both GOG and Steam."

Krapovsky is serious about old-school video games: before co-founding SNEG, he spent several years at GOG.

Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace, Fantasy Empires, DragonStrike, Deathkeep, and the Silver Box Classic Bundle will be available at the end of March, with specific No specific date has been set yet, but they will be available on Steam (open in new tab) and GOG (open in new tab).