Evolution, it turns out, can work on a publisher’s reputation too. On 28 October 2025, GOG announced a fresh wave of sixteen additions to its Preservation Program, and tucked into a list headlined by stealth, tomb-raiding and a very punctual assassin sat the most unlikely conservation candidate on the store: the SPORE Collection. Seventeen years earlier, Spore had been the game angry customers held up whenever they wanted to explain everything wrong with PC DRM. Now it carries a stamp promising that a shop will keep it running on machines its makers never imagined. That is not a small turnaround. It is practically a new stage of life — and Spore, of all games, knows a thing or two about those.
What the GOG Preservation Program actually promises
The Preservation Program is not a remaster scheme, and GOG is quite clear that it is not interested in repainting old games until they look like new ones. Launched in November 2024 with an initial hundred titles, the scheme is a maintenance commitment: GOG says it will spend its own resources keeping enrolled games compatible with current and future Windows systems, even after the original developers have stopped supporting them. Games are tested, fixed where the testing fails, and only then given the program’s stamp. Each store page carries a Preservation Log so buyers can see what was actually done, rather than taking the badge on faith.
The practical details matter as much as the pledge. Program games are sold DRM-free, with offline installers and dedicated tech support, and GOG says a title stays in the initiative even if it later stops being sold. Coverage figures from Video Games Chronicle put the catalogue at 216 games after this October wave landed. GOG’s stated ambition reaches much further — eventually, it wants its entire classic catalogue brought up to the same standard. That is slow, unglamorous engineering work: resolution support, controller behaviour, installers that survive a new Windows version. It is also precisely the kind of work that quietly decides whether a game exists in ten years or merely gets talked about.
The October wave: all sixteen arrivals
Spore did not arrive alone, and the company it keeps says a lot about the program’s range. The full list GOG published for the 28 October 2025 batch runs to sixteen titles: Tomb Raider GOTY — the Game of the Year edition of Crystal Dynamics’ 2013 reboot — Hitman: Codename 47, the SPORE Collection, Clive Barker’s Undying, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Nostradamus: The Last Prophecy, Superhero League of Hoboken, Heart of China, Thunderscape, North & South, Titus The Fox: To Marrakech and Back, Battle Chess 4000, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus, Call of Cthulhu: Prisoner of Ice, and Bloodwych.
Read that list slowly and it spans four decades of PC gaming, from Bloodwych’s dungeon crawling and the Elvira horror adventures through to a blockbuster from 2013. Some arrivals needed visible surgery: for the original Splinter Cell, GOG’s log records added support for modern resolutions and aspect ratios including 16:9, antialiasing, and a capped 60Hz refresh rate to keep the physics behaving. Others simply needed someone to confirm, document and guarantee that they still work. Spore’s entry is the SPORE Collection, which bundles the base game with the Creepy & Cute Parts Pack and the Galactic Adventures expansion — the complete version, in other words, rather than a bare tidepool starter kit.
From a single cell to a starship captain
A quick refresher, because Spore’s ambition is easy to forget under the weight of its launch controversy. Developed by Maxis — the studio behind The Sims — under designer Will Wright, and released by EA in September 2008, Spore asked players to shepherd one species through five stages of existence. You began as a microbe paddling around a tidepool in the Cell stage, grew legs and attitude in the Creature stage, then organised in the Tribe stage, built in the Civilization stage, and finally took to the stars in the Space stage, captaining a ship across a galaxy stuffed with planets to terraform, colonies to plant and the ominous Grox to avoid.
The connective tissue was a suite of editors so friendly that making things became the game. Creatures, buildings, vehicles and starships all came out of the same playful toolkit, and your creations could be shared with other players, whose worlds your game quietly populated in return. Reviewers were broadly kind — contemporary coverage noted a Metacritic average in the mid-eighties — and the concept landed with the public: EA announced two million copies sold by the end of September 2008. None of that, however, is what the launch is remembered for.
2008: the year Spore became a DRM byword
Spore shipped with SecuROM, Sony’s copy-protection system, and with rules that felt borrowed from a rental agreement. The game had to be authenticated online at installation. Each product key could initially be activated on just three computers, and uninstalling did not hand an activation back; burn through your allowance with a dead hard drive, a new build or an operating-system reinstall, and the official remedy was a telephone call to EA customer support to plead for more. An even harsher scheme had been floated first — re-authentication every ten days — and was dropped before launch after public opposition, but the version that shipped still treated every paying customer as a suspect on parole.
The objection was not only to the limits. It was to the secrecy. SecuROM installed itself as a separate piece of software alongside the game, and critics charged that it stayed on the machine even after Spore itself was removed. For a single-player game about watching a cartoon amoeba grow feet, the arrangement struck many buyers as grotesquely out of proportion — and they said so in the most public place available to them.
One-star reviews, a lawsuit, and a piracy record nobody wanted
The Amazon protest became the story within days. Contemporary tallies vary because the pile grew hourly, but the shape of it never changed: on 10 September 2008, Den of Geek counted almost 2,000 Amazon reviews of which 1,814 awarded one star; TorrentFreak’s count a few days later found 2,018 one-star ratings out of 2,219. Reviewers repeatedly said the game itself was not the target — the DRM was, with many explaining they were refusing to buy, or scoring the policy rather than Wright’s design. It remains one of the clearest early examples of review-bombing as organised consumer protest.
The argument then moved from star ratings to a courtroom. In September 2008 a class-action lawsuit was filed in US federal court in California on behalf of Maryland resident Melissa Thomas and other purchasers. Reporting on the filing at the time describes its core allegations: that EA had not disclosed that installing Spore would also install SecuROM as a stand-alone program, that it could not be removed short of reformatting the drive, and that this breached California’s Consumer Legal Remedies Act and Unfair Competition Law. EA has always had its own account of how its protection behaved, and the lawsuit’s claims were allegations rather than findings — but their existence, a fortnight after launch, tells you how completely the conversation had escaped the company’s control.
Then came the statistic that followed Spore for years. TorrentFreak’s year-end table named it the most pirated game of 2008, with an estimated 1.7 million BitTorrent downloads; it had logged roughly half a million of those in its first week alone. Journalists at the time connected the two facts directly, arguing that the protection had handed pirates their best recruiting pitch: the unauthorised version was, in one crucial respect, the less restricted product. Piracy on that scale has many causes, and a hype-heavy Will Wright game would have been pirated heavily in any year — but a launch cannot be called a DRM success when the protected edition sets the piracy record.
How EA backed down, step by step
To its credit, EA did move — in increments, under pressure. Within weeks of launch, the activation allowance rose from three computers to five. EA’s games chief Frank Gibeau publicly acknowledged complaints from legitimate customers and promised a de-authorisation approach, modelled on the tool BioShock had received, so owners could release a machine properly instead of phoning a helpdesk. The ten-day re-authentication idea never returned. Over the following years the game migrated to digital storefronts, and the story reaches its logical end on GOG, where the store page for the SPORE Collection states the terms flatly: DRM-free, with no activation or online connection required to play. The game that once phoned home before it would evolve now installs from an offline installer and asks nobody’s permission. As redemption arcs go, that one took seventeen years and a change of shop.
Why Spore needed a keeper even though its servers never quite died
It would be tidy to report that Spore’s online features were switched off in 2017 and that GOG rescued a corpse. The record says something messier, and more interesting. Spore’s sharing features — uploading creations, browsing the online Sporepedia, letting other players’ creatures wander into your galaxy — were always an extra layer over a fundamentally single-player game, and that layer rested on one online account per copy. In 2017 EA’s servers were relocated rather than closed, according to later discussion on EA’s own help forums, and a patch followed — but only for the digital editions. Owners of the original disc release found their version could not simply be patched up to the new arrangement, and forum posts from the period describe a familiar scavenger hunt of uninstalling, redeeming ageing codes and asking support for help.
That friction has never fully gone away. Posts on EA’s forums describe newer digital players having to contact support so a serial code can be added to their account by hand before online registration will work. None of this makes Spore unplayable — its core campaign works offline, which is exactly what the GOG edition leans on — but it shows how many small dependencies accumulate around an old game: an activation back end here, an account database there, an installer written for another era of Windows underneath it all. Preservation, in Spore’s case, is less about resurrecting the dead than about cutting away the dependencies that were always most likely to kill it. The Preservation Program’s guarantee covers the game GOG sells; the fate of EA’s own sharing servers remains EA’s to decide, and players should read Spore’s Preservation Log on its store page for exactly what this edition does and does not include.
And Darkspore? The open grave next door
Which brings us to the name hanging over this whole story. Darkspore, Maxis’s 2011 action-RPG spin-off, took Spore’s creature-editing technology somewhere darker and more Diablo-like — and built the entire game on a permanent internet connection. There was no offline mode to fall back on. EA delisted it from digital stores in 2013, and in December 2015 announced the end: the servers closed on 1 March 2016. Because the game could not function without them, closure did not mean losing a multiplayer feature. It meant the game stopped existing as a playable object, for everyone who had bought it, less than five years after release.
Nothing in the October announcement changes that. Darkspore was not in the batch of sixteen, it is not in the Preservation Program, and no publisher has announced an offline resurrection for it. Players continue to ask for one — the title has a page on GOG’s community Dreamlist, where fans vote for games they want brought back — and small community efforts to reconstruct local server behaviour have been discussed for years without producing an official, purchasable return. Honesty demands the distinction be kept sharp: a preservation program can maintain a game that exists in a playable form, but Darkspore would first need its publisher to rebuild or authorise the missing half of it. Spore’s rescue makes that absence more conspicuous, not less. The older, stranger, more famous sibling gets a keeper and an offline installer; the younger one remains the textbook example of what happens when a single-player-adjacent game is welded to a server with an expiry date.
A species worth keeping
Strip away the irony and Spore’s preservation is easy to defend on the merits. No other mainstream game has attempted its particular trick — one continuous arc from microbe to galactic empire, with the player’s own handmade creatures carried through every stage — and its editors influenced a generation of creation tools that followed. It is also, now, a primary source in the history of how the industry learned, the hard way, that copy protection is part of the product and customers will judge it as such. Keeping such a game bootable, documented and honestly labelled is exactly the job the Preservation Program describes for itself.
So welcome back to the ecosystem, Spore — this time with no activation limit counting your installations, no separate software riding along uninvited, and a shop publicly committed to fixing you when the next Windows arrives. Whether Darkspore ever follows it out of the dark is a question only EA can answer. But if the moral of 2008 was that players never forget being treated as a threat, the moral of 2025 might be a better one: treated as a legacy instead, even the most controversial game of its year can evolve.