What the h*ll? I came here expecting things in league with Ceasar 3, Stronghold 2, Lords of the Realm 2, Fragile Allegiance, Total Annihilation, COMMAND AND CONQUER!!!

I expected GOOD OLD GAMES to be 20-30 years old... You know OOOOOOOLLLLLLDDDDD!!!!!!

All I find on your pages, are games released last year... THERE ARE GAMES ON HERE STILL IN ALPHA!!!

Do you even understand the difference between windows 95, 98, and XP? I bet you have never even heard of the above games before now...

Do you understand the meaning of LEGACY? When you hear 'WOW CLASSIC IS NOW RELEASED' do you ask, can i run it on my andriod? This site is a joke...

Where are all the games from the 90s? Do you even know what the 90s are? Do you even know what the 2000s are? Have you heard of history? If a few months old, constitutes OOOOLLLLLDDDDD to you, then you are (modded) not very smart...

[Modded: please refrain from using vulgar language and insulting anyone of this forum]

Almost all of those games are on here, with the exception of C&C. The reason for that one is because they are now owned by EA, who won't release their games DRM-free on GOG. There isn't anything GOG can do about that. The others, if you search for them, you will find.

It's true that GOG has been allowing newer games onto the store as well in recent years, but many of the older ones are here, if you look for them. It would be good if it were possible to more easily search by release date in the store though.

Do tell, old enemy, how do I search for legacy games? How do I tell this retard bin that windows XP is the cut off point? That windows 98 was a great time? The vast majority of these games are new, how do i even sift through this list without taking hours to look into each and ever game, just to see which ones are actually old... Then start looking at that list for something I want?

Oh, you're THAT GUY?! Lol ...

Well, for a start, GOG updates the older games to run on modern systems. So, you're not going to be able to search by Windows version. What I generally do is just search by name in the search bar at the top of every page for names of older games I want, then gradually add them to my wishlist.

Otherwise, I agree the search functions in the store aren't the best. I think your best bet would be to choose a store category and then sort by 'oldest first'. Most of what you're looking for should be in the first several pages.

I wouldn't say the vast majority of the games are new, although it depends on how you define 'new'.

Let's see...
GOG has stopped being "Good Old Games" in 2012. It literally says so in that news piece. Arguably that was the start of the slippery slope for them and not the more obvious 2014 "good news", but that's another discussion.
Even from the beginning they aimed to make older games work on newer systems and not offer the legacy ones as they are. From launch, back in 2008, they never looked at anything before XP, their first goal being to have the entire catalog work on XP. Unfortunately, with the focus being on the client, Galaxy, as of a certain point, and that being made to require 7 and newer, they not only no longer care to make games work on XP (or Vista), but have even made some of games that used to work on XP no longer do so, even if you use the offline installers. And I fear that sooner rather than later they'll start dropping 7 support as well, and I don't only mean for new games that themselves require Windows 10, of which they have started adding quite a number already.
However, if you're just looking for games released in certain years, while the awful tenth anniversary redesign removed the year filters from the catalog from the UI, the filters themselves do still exist, so far, if added manually to the URL, so check out the workarounds. Note that only those listed year ranges are available, so p2000 for games before 2000 is the oldest filter available.

There are exactly 449 games on GOG that were released between 1990 and 1999.

Between 1979 and 1989 there are 44 games
Between 2000 and 2009 there are 486 games in the catalog.
Between 2010 and 2019 there are 1790 games
And between 2020 and 2022 (to cover upcoming) there are 377

Either you have no idea how to search or you are nothing but a troll.. that said I think you'll find more then enough classics here to make you happy... unless anger and spite is all you have inside you.

you totally missed the point, i dont mean 'runs on 98' i mean games that were released on win 98. I remember being a boy with a hand me down 95 tower, and a windows 98 'new computer' with an upgraded 512MB RAM.... lol

I just recently went through Caesar 3, and I heard one sound byte that it shared with Lords2. It was just a second or two, but i recognized it. That sent me into a tailspin down memory lane. So I wanted to see some of those game I wasnt old enough to understand or appreciate at that time. See if I could find what I was missing Well, you can ask Time4Tea what happened to my good will. But thats a whole other story...

I got very frustrated, enough so to come on here and scream about it because I could not tell the difference between new games and old... Titles and images alone are not telling.

But just look at those numbers you put up. More then half the games are contemporary cash grabs without a soul...

This is an old frustration. It first began when I wanted to find 'the oregon trail' a classic i first saw in grade school. I went to find it, and, you know what I found? a farmville clone... That began a deep-seated hatred of modern developers. No one can make anything original, just thousands of cheap copies of other games with click bait titles 'the epic awesomeness' 'super NPCs of epic town!' 'NOSTALGIA ABUSING PARADISE!!!' you know... 'new' games...

According to Starkrun's numbers above, there are over 500 games here released before XP, since that was in 2001. But do note that, since making games designed for Win 9x to work on more modern Windows version is notoriously difficult, in case of plenty of those that have both DOS and Win 9x versions, the DOS version, running in DOSBox, is the one available here.

On another note, you may want to check Archive.org's classic games too. Full games tend to only be playable in browser though.

I went over to archive.org, one of the first things I saw was the attached pic. I dont know how this site handles attached stuff. But that was the display image for Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 Demo 2001. By todays standards it looks tacky and dated. But did we really need better graphics? I mean I look at those trees. My mind flashes to Halo. all we really needed was to make that (then) cutting edge graphics a little cleaner. Put more attention into features, fine details that actually mattered. New racing games are more vivid then real life. But for all the new advancements, all they did was make games more expensive. They would have added insane levels of features. Imagine a tacky looking racing game that would allow you to drive across a continent with cartography level of detail... Simple platforms, with vast amounts of content... Content that doesnt cost millions to make... Content that takes a twentieth of the time to make...

I appreciate old games, because they are humble, but full of heart, they are only limited by the technology at hand, not the imagination of the artist.

Im going down a rabbit hole now, but just consider this...

Jet Force Gemini 1999

Morrowind 2002

Skyrim 2011

Battle Brothers 2015

Look at how graphics changed from cartoony Jet Force Gemini to next gen Morrowind. In three years... Then nine years later... Skyrim isnt that much better. In fact, if you just improve the animations and textures a little, I would prefer the Morrowind graphics to Skryim. Just smooth the rough edges... Then we have the total decline to cartoon. Battle brothers, 'new' 'next gen' I would rather look at the simple but realistic graphics of Morrowind, then devolve to cartoons...

The thing that matters, is letting the mind normalize what it seems. The imagination fills in the blanks. The Morrowind example is perfect, because your mind takes simple but realistic imagery and makes it feel real. Its about representation, rather then reflection. But instead of peddling back to something that was perfectly good. Developers who cant compete with ultra 4k resort to cartoons... its really disappointing... Instinctually people acknowledge that simple is better, but they dont hold true to what is good, they go all the way to the bottom of the barrel.... Cheap cartoons are cheap...

@Time4Tea, thats why i wanted morrowind to work so badly, because i wanted something that was good. just updated by people with passion. But no one wanted to respect the original intent...

WTF?

For unique games i would say:
ELEX, Styx, SOMA, Ghost of a Tale, Horizon Zero Dawn, AER, A Plague Tale, Maize, State of Mind, Seasons after Fall, Darksider, Mars: War Logs, The Dwarves, VampYr, Conarium, Breathedge, Tower of Time, Megaton Rainfall, ECHO, Inner Chains, Overlord's, Red Faction Guerrilla, Alba, We Happy Few, Oxen Free, Fallout: New Vegas, Tacoma, Event [0], Observer, No Man's Sky, Interstate '76, Singularity, Timeshift, Tron 2.0, Rebel Galaxy, Saints Row 3 or 4, Wizardry 8, Shadow Warrior 2013, Clive Barker Undying, Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Alan Wake, Oddworld Strangers Wrath, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Arx Fatalis

These are the most unique titles I've played, maybe one will rekindle your faith?

The problem is that my will to try comes in spurts. Again, ask Time4Tea what happened on the OpenMW forums... Hateful people eroded my will to try simply by disregarding the point of everything. Over, and over, and over..... I havent gone back to looking at Morrowind after that horrible experience. I desperately want to perfect it with mods, but people insisted on disregarding the original intent, to the point of denying that the primary story telling narrative exists...

I came to gog to look for something. And again, all I saw was a sea of cheap counterfeits... So I got pissed off and lost the will to try... Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. Assuming this thread doesnt get deleted as hateful, because I have an honest complaint. Maybe ill be able to look at that list and be able to appreciate something.

Its hard, once your spirit gets crushed, its difficult to believe again, but when people do it to you over and over and over, for years... You tend to just flip your sh*t at them. Then you get these people that call you 'hate filled' with no consideration for how you got to that point...

You can't find a higher quantity/quality of old games in any other shop. It's as simple as that.

And while it is true that they no longer sell only old games, having a shop with good, more modern games is still good for users. And for GOG, because selling only old games could have ended up stagnating the shop.