Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has been added to the GOG Preservation Program. The program, launched in 2024, is an initiative aimed at preserving the availability and compatibility of classic video games on modern and future PCs. As part of the program, the game has received several updates that make it play better than ever. It may not be the now-canceled remake Ubisoft was working on, but it is something.

GOG announced Sands of Time's induction into the Preservation Program in a press release. "Our team has gone deep into the sands of the original Scimitar engine," GOG wrote, "rebuilding our early experimental work into a lightweight wrapper designed to address the challenges of running this 2003 classic on modern hardware." The technical update brings improvements like widescreen and ultrawide display support, customizable camera scaling, the ability to choose a preferred frame rate, and a new in-game overlay that lets players change field-of-view and other settings on the fly.

A video released by GOG specifically points to Ubisoft's cancellation of the Sands of Time remake as the reason for fixing the original game on PC. Prior to these new technical fixes, playing Sands of Time on modern hardware was plagued by physics and display issues that required frustrating workarounds. Thanks to the GOG Preservation Program, the game now runs smoothly and natively. The video goes into the nitty-gritty details of how the team at GOG made all these fixes to Sands of Time. It gets very in the weeds, but is a fascinating watch for anybody slightly interested in how old games were designed and what goes into making them compatible with modern hardware.

A particularly interesting tidbit from the video is that the core wrapper architecture that GOG used to fix Sands of Time is "game agnostic." That means it can be used as a basis for updating other DirectX titles in the future, though each new game will still need some custom reverse engineering. To celebrate Sands of Time's induction into the GOG Preservation Program, the game is currently on sale for $2.99 until Aug. 23.