GOG is returning to its 'Good Old Games' roots

(Image credit: CD Projekt)

In 2012, the online retailer formerly known as Good Old Games rebranded itself as GOG and began selling current releases, while promising to remain committed to DRM-free distribution and the absence of regional pricing. While GOG continued adding older games to the catalogue, they sat alongside more up-to-date releases. (A look at the banner on top of GOG.com today shows Horizon Zero Dawn beneath a rerelease of The Wheel of Time, which first came out in 1999.) Today, GOG announced a plan to "come back to our classic roots".

Don't expect the name to change again or those new releases to vanish from the shop. Instead, the aim is to make classic games more visible and the first step is a "revival of [the] Good Old Games concept". The newly added Good Old Game tag highlights more than 500 games, each of which is over a decade old and widely considered a classic, though you're welcome to quibble with the specifics of individual games.

A scroll through the list shows beloved names like Planescape: Torment, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, The Curse of Monkey Island, Theme Hospital, System Shock 2, Blade Runner, and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. It's also a slightly rude reminder that games like Dragon Age: Origins and Fallout: New Vegas are more than 10 years old and have apparently passed the event horizon by which games are allowed to be counted as classics. That's made me feel downright vintage.

This is described as the start of GOG's return to enhancing the "visibility and discoverability" of classic games. We'll have to wait and see what the next step is. Meanwhile, here's a look back at where it all began, with the start of GOG's journey to bring good old games back to life.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.