Gundato: One way to look at it is something similar to (but not as blatant as) Metal Gear 2 and Metal Gear Solid. Yes, MG2 came first and had the overall story, but you learned all you needed to learn in the first few minutes of MGS, and MGS took liberties by adding flavor to events.

For the most part, The later LoK don't need to add flavor to Blood Omen, but the overall plot of the series really starts in Soul Reaver.

Ixodid: I know how you feel. But sadly, Blood Omen is somewhat the mutant child of the franchise that is locked away in a cuboard and is fed fishheads from time to time.

It's releasy just went by somewhat unnoticed (at least I don't recall there ever being a hype about it in any huge magazine around here).
As I mentioned in my review for Soul Reaver, same was the game which brought LoK into the limelight of gaming, since it was gory, was one of the first games on the original PSX which had as good as none loadtimes despite looking brilliant for its time and was praised for story etc.

ONly after the release and Success of Soul Reaver people startet to get courious about its predecessor, hearing that you could play Kain and that t explained his origins etc.
But for most the couriosity ended when they saw that the first game was a 2D somewhat isometric view Hack'n Slash cross rpg-ish hybrid thing with poor cgi cutscenes and a very unforgiving difficulty curve.

Underneath all that was a pretty good game, but still it's understandable that some people where put off after expecting something in the likes of Soul Reaver. The game was frigging huge, with a vast variety of weapons, spells, armors to find, lots of places to explore, secrets to find and a very interesting and compelling story, brought to life by some great voiceactors and a great score. And who doesn't get a kick out of your hero yelling "Vae Victus!" while laughing like a madman?

But I guess the main problem in releasing it today isn't the vast difference to its successors, but rather a licensing issue. As far as I know the only person of the "LoK Team" who was involved in the creation of Blood Omen was the writer Amy Hennig, while the game itself was created by Silicon Knights and published by Activision. As with Soul Reaver and so on it was Crystal Dynamics who created and Eidos (now Square) who published the games. Guess that's why the Collectors Box which is mentioned by another user here lacks Blood Omen.

God knows who owns the rights to that. The last time I heard something of Silicon Knights was when they made "Eternal Darkness" and together with Konami "Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes" both for the gamecube. Also Activision never did something with Blood Omen ever again. No Platinum Series release for the PSX, no bargain bin release for the PC, nil, nada, niet, null.(as far as I know)

The PSX version of Blood Omen is somewhat findable around here. If you're lucky you'll find it on a fleamarket or in a used games store (other than gamestop "shudders") and you'll almost never have to pay more than a ten, since most people don't know about the series or just don't care.

BUt that's not what most fans want. THey want the PC release, with the big cardboard box, the coloured manual and the huge map of Nosgoth. It's rather rare and some blokes on Ebay made a living of fooling fans into buying the thing for enormus prices and sometimes it just were fakes.

A release on GoG could never replace the feel of having the box with all that stuff, but it would give the diehard fans the chance to at least own an original copy of the pc game instead of a PSX version as a substitude or an image of the net.

Getting the game to run shouldn't be the problem, the fans managed that kind of by themselves. One community made an unofficial patch that not only fixes some issues, but comes with an own installer for the whole game (of course requiring to have the original disk in your drive) which bypasses the old installer that would glitch up on modern OSs and allowing the game to run mutch better on such, but a russian fancommunity even made a Bink patch wich converts all cgi vids into...well...the bink format so that they don't glitch up anymore because of missing legacy codecs and whatnot.

It also will run on widescreen Monitors pretty well. Yeah, the old 2D sprites may look blodgy and whatnot, but it's upscaled in ratio, so Kain doesn't look fat or flat (at least not more flat than a 2D sprite can look) and overall it looks more enjoyable since the huge hud know doesn't take op almost half of the screen, but instead is tucked away to the far left, giving away much more of the map.

OH man, this is getting tl;dr. ^^"
Bottom line, somebody already made it compatible, it's just a question of who is holding the right and if the fansites are ok with including their efforts into a official GoG release.

Sequiro: As for Legacy of Kain. Amy Henning is no longer at Crystal Dynamics, she works at Naughty Dog and is a big part of the Uncharted games. in fact pretty much everyone thats worked on the LoK series is either moved on or died. There continues to this day to be rumors that they are rebooting the Legacy of kain series soon. But with Tony Jay passed away and Amy Henning no longer writing story I just don't see how it would ever be as good as before.

Ixodid: While it is true that you can enjoy all games from Soul Reaver onward without ever having played Blood Omen, it still can help you understand some of the events better or get some certain winks/hints/eastereggs that are threwn throughout the other games.

For example, most people playing Soul Reaver wont know what is so special about the giant stone skull that is reachable in one area and what purpose it has/had, unless they play Blood Omen.

Many of Raziels conversations with Moebius turn Bittersweet when you know what he did in Blood Omen.

The whole Ark with the conqueror gets a whole new twist when you know what happened in Blood Omen, as well as the whole Anti-Vampire crusade the Serafan broke loose.

I could go into more detail and name some more, but I want to keep it spoiler free. :)

Sure, you could read that all up in some FAQ or Timelines on the many Fansites etc, but why not experiencing it first hand in a not bad and a bit underrated game?

While I can understand that the drastically diferent style of gameplay can be a nogo for some, or that it's not just their cup of tea, but having the game here avaible so all the completists and or people who like the game can get it legally won't hurt anybody. :)

Ixodid: While it is true that you can enjoy all games from Soul Reaver onward without ever having played Blood Omen, it still can help you understand some of the events better or get some certain winks/hints/eastereggs that are threwn throughout the other games.

For example, most people playing Soul Reaver wont know what is so special about the giant stone skull that is reachable in one area and what purpose it has/had, unless they play Blood Omen.

Many of Raziels conversations with Moebius turn Bittersweet when you know what he did in Blood Omen.

The whole Ark with the conqueror gets a whole new twist when you know what happened in Blood Omen, as well as the whole Anti-Vampire crusade the Serafan broke loose.

I could go into more detail and name some more, but I want to keep it spoiler free. :)

Sure, you could read that all up in some FAQ or Timelines on the many Fansites etc, but why not experiencing it first hand in a not bad and a bit underrated game?

While I can understand that the drastically diferent style of gameplay can be a nogo for some, or that it's not just their cup of tea, but having the game here avaible so all the completists and or people who like the game can get it legally won't hurt anybody. :)

spinefarm: As far as I know... they are thinking for a HD release on the series... so we will see

StingingVelvet: I would love to see Square/Eidos get into the HD re-release phenomenon on consoles... Deus Ex collection, Thief collection, Legacy of Kain collection, Tomb Raider collection, Final Fantasy... jesus, I would buy them all.

StingingVelvet: Oh, can anyone speak to how this works on Intel integrated graphics? I wouldn't mind playing this while overseas, but a laptop is all I got.

spinefarm: Why only on consoles... PC will be nice too

Gundato: I imagine the reception.

On the consoles, one of the driving forces of the HD Re-release is to allow people to play the game due to backwards compatibility. That is generally there on PC.

So when we get God of War HD (even back when the PS3 could play PS2 games),most people say "Yay!". Whereas we get Baldurs Gate HD and a lot of people say "But, I can already play this with no effort."