ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical adventure and role-playing games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed! ScummVM is a complete rewrite of these games' executables and is not an emulator.

ScummVM supports a huge library of adventures with over 250 games in total. It supports many classics published by legendary studios like LucasArts, Sierra On-Line, Revolution Software, Cyan, Inc. and Westwood Studios. Next to ground-breaking titles like the Monkey Island series, Broken Sword, Myst, Blade Runner and countless other games you will find some really obscure adventures and truly hidden gems to explore.

You can find a full list with details on which games are supported and how well on the compatibility page. ScummVM is continually improving, so check back often. Among the systems on which you can play those games are Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, PS Vita, Switch, Dreamcast, AmigaOS, Atari/FreeMiNT, RISC OS, Haiku, PSP, PS3, Maemo, GCW Zero and many more.

What's New

The team was quite busy working on new engines and enhancing existing ones. The list of supported games grew noticeably, and we now support these additions:

  • Adibou 1
  • Classical Cats
  • The Dark Eye
  • Dark Side
  • Escape From Hell
  • Gadget: Invention Travel and Adventure
  • Gobliiins 5
  • The Excavation of Hob's Barrow
  • Kingdom: The Far Reaches
  • Might and Magic Book One
  • Muppet Treasure Island
  • Nancy Drew: The Final Scene
  • Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion
  • Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill
  • Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned for Danger
  • Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower
  • Primordia
  • Reah: Face the Unknown
  • Schizm: Mysterious Journey
  • Shardlight
  • Strangeland
  • Syberia and Syberia II (macOS versions only)
  • Technobabylon
  • The Vampire Diaries
  • Whispers of a Machine
  • Wrath of the Gods and four other Director titles.
  • 14 AGS titles by Stranga and Cloak and Dagger

All together, we've introduced 50 new games and five new engines.

New platforms

We are happy to see the RetroArch port being properly rewritten, and the port is now part of our source code. The Atari port has also been redone from scratch and now talks natively to the hardware, skipping SDL as an intermediate layer. That made many more games playable on the platform. The Atari FireBee port is still using the SDL library, though.

Speed-optimized graphics

Thanks to the work of one of the GSoC participants this year, Wyatt Radkiewicz (a.k.a. eklipsed), we now use CPU-specific SIMD instructions such as SSE, AVX2, and NEON for drawing graphics in the AGS engine and in some generic routines. This led to 4-14x speedup in drawing for many cases.

Networking games

This year, we merged with the Backyard Sports Online project, which made it possible to play Backyard Football, Backyard Baseball 2001 and Backyard Football 2002 over the internet with other humans. Also, the Moonbase Commander support is in active playtesting mode, though not yet ready for prime time.

Notable engine enhancements

The AGS engine has been brought up to version 3.6.0.53 from upstream.

For many engines, we added support for numerous Chinese and Japanese game variants.

Believe it or not, we implemented a lot of native GUI dialogs for SCUMM games, bringing them closer to the original experience. We also rewrote the sound code for the SCUMM Humongous Entertainment games, making them flawless.

We performed a deep review of the Broken Sword 1 game engine, implementing some small, previously unnoticed things like scene transitions, in-game menu peculiarities, accurate fonts, idle animations, and more. Now, the game is absolutely faithful to the original.

Previous release notes

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.