Twenty years ago today, on Tue Oct 9 16:30:12 2001, Ludvig Strigeus pushed the initial revision of the ScummVM code, which was version 0.0.1 of the project. Time flew quickly and, fast-forward to the present day, we are proudly releasing ScummVM 2.5.0 “Twenty years ago today…”
The list of changes is tremendous.
First of all, this is the first release that supports 2.5D games (almost 3D), thanks to the merger with ResidualVM. With this release we announce support for Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey and Myst 3: Exile. This is why we jumped straight to 2.5 in our versioning. Please note that only desktop platforms currently support these games and other platforms may or may not gain the support later depending on their capabilities.
In addition to these 3 games and engines, we officially support 10 more new engines and subengines that add compatibility with the following games:
- Little Big Adventure
- Red Comrades 1: Save the Galaxy
- Red Comrades 2: For the Great Justice
- Transylvania
- Crimson Crown
- OO-Topos
- Glulx interactive fiction games
- Private Eye
- AGS Games versions 2.5+
- Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy
- The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
- Crusader: No Remorse
- L-ZONE
- Spaceship Warlock
We love localized game releases and multiple platform versions, thus with this release, we enhanced the support for Lure of the Temptress Konami release, Blue Force Spanish, Ringworld Spanish, Amazon: Guardians of Eden Spanish, Mystery House French, Russian translations of Sierra AGI games, Elvira 1 Japanese PC-98, Bargon Attack Russian, Woodruff Russian, Eye of the Beholder Japanese Sega-CD, Legend of Kyrandia Hebrew, Legend of Kyrandia 2 Hebrew, Legend of Kyrandia 3 Simplified Chinese, Inherit the Earth PC-98 Japanese, Gabriel Knight 1 Macintosh, Xeen Russian to name but a few. Notably, Macintosh b/w versions of Loom and Indy 3 are now also supported.
Besides the new games and game versions, ScummVM 2.5.0 brings many notable improvements and new features. We have completed a major rework of the GUI: We now support Unicode characters everywhere. The GUI also adapts to high resolutions used in HiDPI screens. The Nintendo DS port has been significantly rewritten. We added GOG and Steam achievements to a large number of Wintermute games and enabled KeyMapper in more games. Thanks to the work of one of our GSoC students, we have now added an option for text-to-speech to the games Sfinx, Soltys and The Griffon Legend.
You may find all of this goodness available to a number of platforms on our downloads page, or let the autoupdater kick in on Macintosh and Windows.
We wish you great adventuring, happy puzzle-solving and exciting journeys to RPG worlds, and hope to see you around in the coming years.
And by the way, GOG.com is running a special promo tied to the release and our anniversary, where you can buy many ScummVM-supported games at a discount.
