Okay So I was playing on my laptop on my way home on the bus today. I was playing a good 40 minutes then all of a sudden the game freezes and has to force close. I love the game played it so much as a kid and I was wondering what was the cause or if it is fixable. Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit 8 gig of ram. Since I am good with computers I almost feel like it's some kind of memory leak.

After 40 mins on a laptop, battery is the most likey answeer.
fyi my Asus sonicmaster laptop (w8, i3 chip and 8g ram) played the game for 3 hours last night without issue... on power.

You are correct in the leak. While this was never confirmed when we played many years ago, we always had to stop and reboot the computer after a lengthy play. The resources would essentially run out.

Back in the day we played this with 16mb of ram... now we have 8g!

Haha Truth!! Had a 3gb HD then a 13!

Nope not the answer. I also played this game on my desktop same result. It just freezes and my computer says the game has to be forced closed. I am thinking application level memory leak not my 8 gigs of ram running out of resources. Never had that problem playing the original game on windows 98 I used to play for hours. You said you played for 3 hours straight which is cool, I believe this error is like a ticking time bomb it can happen whenever. You just got lucky lol.

Same issue. Desktop Windows 7 Ulti. 64-bit 8GB ram. Locks up at random (and as there is no auto-save, I lose my game for the 2nd time).

The thing is, I only have this issue with the GoG release. I never had this issue when I installed the game from my old disc. Hell, I was playing it a few months ago without any issue...

I played this game so much back in the day, I remember all kinds of tricks when playing:

Save often...and after saving for a while (say ebery 30 min or so) load the game from your last save. This helps with the in-game memory leak.

If your game starts to slow down or acts weird (tabs freezing, etc), try the reload save trick, if that doesn't help then exit the game and restart.

More often than not, the reload of a save every so often can keep you playing for hours on end :)

The odd thing is, since I lost my original disc, I've been playing a cracked version and it NEVER crashed on me, I can play for ages, and did until recently (every year, at least once I play Rebellion).

This version on Gog... Guaranteed crash every time I play and I'm really not used to saving often (usually only when I stop playing / go to bed :P ). It's getting annoying and I haven't played since :( Think I'm going back to the cracked version...

The GOG version is 1.01, my old one is 1.0. Could that be the reason?