Now you can play Westwood's classic Blade Runner on modern PCs

(Image credit: Westwood Studios)

Westwood, the studio behind the original Command & Conquer and Dune games, took a break from real-time strategy in 1997 and released Blade Runner, a point and click adventure game that bucked convention and became one of the most memorable games of the genre. Now, thanks to the ScummVM development community, you can finally play it again easily on modern PCs.

As Eurogamer reports, Westwood lost the source code for Blade Runner during a studio move, which made a modern port of the game impossible. And with Westwood now long since shuttered, it's fallen to the community behind ScummVM to backwards-engineer some of the classic games of the '90s to get them working on modern hardware.

It's taken quite a few years, but they've finally gotten Blade Runner to work with Scumm. It's a game that departed from some of the unwritten rules of point-and-clicks by doing things like having NPCs follow somewhat random routines in real-time, each trying to accomplish his or her own goals while you go about tracking down replicants.

It's certainly worth a look. Andy Kelly played through it in 2017 when Blade Runner 2049 was set to premiere, and found that it still maintains the compelling, rain-soaked atmosphere of Ridley Scott's original film.

You can download ScummVR from the official site.

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