Introducing Refurbished Dinosaurs

As far back as I can remember, I was always fascinated by the games I couldn’t play. During my school years, I was a bookworm, and spent a great deal more time reading about games than actually playing them, as my eyesight was poor, and videogame magazines were much more readily available than the videogames themselves.

In 2008 GOG.com was established, and it changed me. Words “game preservation” were quite new for me, but they rang true; and I have discovered my deepest passion yet.

It’s 2026 now, and AI agents are eating the software world. Decompilations and recompilations are dime a dozen, but I wanted to do something a tad bit more interesting than just one more one-and-done all-time favourite of mine, and as a wise guy Claude would put it, “I didn’t just do a game, I did a whole methodology”.

Please welcome The Standard, The Protocol, and the triumphal return of the “Chaos Overlords” - better than you remember them.

“What are these, Igor?!” you might cry. “And can I play Chaos Overlords already, I don’t care about the other stuff”.

Oh, but you do. You see, The Standard is a way of documenting games so that they could live forever. It is agent-friendly, wiki-friendly and ensure that game behaviour is captured so precisely, that any amount of remakes on any platforms could be made, in an ethical, clean room approach.

The Protocol describes steps for researching games in order to produce the documentation that follows the Standard. If you have any agents of your own, you can ask them to follow Protocol while researching a particular game, and eventually you will get a full documentation - do with it as you please.

The big idea is that this approach scales. Anyone can bring back any game they are fond of. Any amount of them. The barrier to entry is low, and entire community benefits from the documentation that this approach produces.

Oh, and yes, you can play “Chaos Overlords” now, and I promise you, it’s the best version you have seen yet. There is a central server for multiplayer now, for one, with proper matchmaking and savegames. Minor but meaningful quality of life improvements are all over the place: tooltips explaining game mechanics or providing relevant contextual information, extra bits of information displayed here and there, other small touches like multi-gang selection, enemy gang listing or extended list of actions that can be performed by drag’n’dropping your gangs.

Try it. Let me know what you think. We can make it even better together.

And if you think that what Refurbished Dinosaurs are doing is useful, please subscribe to our mailing list, for we are just getting started

And that’s how Refurbished Dinosaurs started.

On a surface the idea is simple:

Refurbished Dinosaurs rebuilds PC games from the 90s and early 2000s so they run natively on Windows, Linux and macOS. Each rebuild loads the art, audio and data from a copy of the original you own, and comes with documentation of how the original works: file formats, rules, formulas and the bugs it shipped with.

It is my absolute pleasure to announce the general availability of the very first Refurbished Dinosaurs release: “Chaos Overlords: New Chrome”.

“Chaos Overlords” is a very strange beast. A turn-based cyberpunk strategy, wearings its tabletop inspirations proudly on its sleeve.