As a retro gamer, (well I play ALL games, but there are so many games I grew up with that are beyond nostalgic) I feel grateful that so many of these retro games are available here.

The early Might and Magics, Gobliiins, (most) of the Zork games, Eye of the Beholder and so many more classic D&D games to count.

These are games I have NEVER seen anywhere else, and it's just so wonderful that you guys care enough to release such old games that seem otherwise forgotten with the twists and turns PC gaming has taken in the last decade.

It almost feels like this site is the only thing keeping these classics alive. And that's why I will always stay loyal to this site regardless of what complaints some people may have.

Thank you, so very very much :)

I too, am grateful for GOG for keeping the old school games alive. They still have a lot more titles to go though.

I kinda agree am younger so I don't remember the days of PC gaming involving DOS. When I was first able to understand PC gaming PC's ran windows 2000. Which is funny cause kids growing up on tablets/windows 8/10 will probably look at 2000 as some archaic hard to understand OS.

Hey GOG if you could get backyard baseball on here my life would be set.

The only complaint I have as that there could be so much more Good Old Games here! I'm afraid that I might be dead by time when Discworld series come around.

I heard that GOG forbids some of the games due to its "high standards", and that they pinned down Abuse video game
because original creator wanted to have it free for PC while GOG was "all about money".

I don't get the reality, but I want to believe still.

They do reject some indie titles, but I think only rarely reject old games. After all we do have Moo3, Lords of the realm 3 etc.

Plenty of abandonware sites and torrents to a great job of keeping old classics as well as unhread of games alive. And archive.org has a collection of about 4000 DOS games, larger than the entire GOG catalog.

That's not keeping it alive, that's necrophilia.

Kudos for finding the Eye of the Beholder series easter egg on GOG! ;)

More like grave robbing.

Yep :) I had trouble at first finding it, but it's one of the most nostalgic games of my childhood I didn't give up.

Though Legend of Grimrock is a spiritual successor in almost every sense of the word, it didn't have that "feel" that the original had. Though still a very fun game.

And that's being somewhat arrogant. Abandonware is not an ideal state of affairs, it's not a clean-cut legal concept, but it is a necessary evil that compensates for a fundamental problem in intellectual property law - when copyright is no longer used for its intended purpose, namely to enable creators to earn a reasonable living from the fruits of their labour, and simply to suppress the existence of past works.

Many of the games on abandonware sites are legitimately "abandoned" - in many cases because the rights to them are so dispersed over multiple disinterested owners (usually because the rights holder ceased to exist without transferring the rights), certain external IPs require re-licensing (cars, football teams, movies, likenesses) that is either prohibitively expensive or impossible because other parties have licensing exclusivity.

I appreciate GOG for the ability to buy out-of-print games legally at reasonable prices, and I appreciate publishers like Night Dive and Tommo for their efforts to track down and consolidate dispersed rights. But for GOG, it's usually only profitable to go after low-hanging fruit (mostly games where the rights are held by a single rights holder), whereas the effort and expense that publishers like Night Dive put in to recover and consolidate the rights to long-lost titles really only pays off for the highest profile titles, and as we see with stuff like No One Lives Forever, there's no guarantee that it's even recoverable in the first place.

If we lived in a perfect world, GOG would acquire every single classic game out there and offer it for sale in perpetuity. We don't live in a perfect world. Sometimes games are so niche and require so much effort and so much expense to buy out rights that the chances of a renewed legal release are basically zero. Copyright law fails to acknowledge this. It is antiquated and assumes that games, movies, music and books are exhaustible assets with limited shelf lives.

Also, in a perfect world, we'd be buying these classic games to support the original creators. In reality, the original creators very rarely see a dime of the income from these digital releases - it's the publishers that are profiting here.

So yes, abandonware sites - at least those that have a healthy respect for publishers and developers that still want to sell their games and actively remove titles that are being actively sold - do as great a job in preserving access to old classics as GOG does. Dismissing such sites out of hand is a demonstration of extreme naivété about how the gaming industry works.

+1 to profit
-1 to karma

lol!

True, while I can't expect "every" classic game to show up on here, I'm still grateful for the amount we do have :)

If I had my way, every obscure (and not so obscure) Apple II game would be on here.

Anyone remember Questron? The Coveted Mirror? Below the Root? Dragon's Keep?

Might happen someday but for now it's just a fantasy.

For example GOG brough here Rage of Mages/Allods series and Evil Islands (in reality it was supposed to be an official Allods 3 but due to copyright war between developer and publisher it became more of a spiritual sucessor with a different name).
So about Evil Islands, it's a mediocre game with really good first chapter and awful ending IMO.
But it was somewhat successfull in Russia and probably in other CIS countries. And in February 2006 a standalone expansion was released under a name of Evil Islands: Lost in Astral. And you know what? We will NEVER see it here on GOG because... it was not published in English, so we Russians can go f@ck ourselves.

That's unexpected. I had looked for it in the catalog here a couple of days ago and didn't immediately find it. Now I dug deeper, and unearthed the Forgotten Realms: The Archives Collection titles. Wow. Thanks a bunch guys!