Happy birthday GOG! 15 years - in Sweden that means you are old enough to get a moped license.

I hope everyone are picking up some good old games, but perhaps also some newer titles as well.
But the question I have for everyone today is, how and when did you find out about GOG?

I will start! I found out about it by a friend at the time who said that they were giving away Duke Nukem 3D (rip) for free in a giveaway, this was December 2012. I created an account and has been an active and devoted forum member and buyer since.

How about you?

Even if I heard of Gog before 2013, I decided to join when I learned about the Baldur's Gate giveaway from some gaming website or stream

Happy Birthday GOG! May you keep growing for many decades yet to come! My profile may say that I joined in 2013, but for all intents and purposes I joined in December of 2020.

In 2013, I came in here to claim the free Fallouts and bought Clive Barker's Undying. Then I pretty much forgot about this site. DRM-Free was nice, but I never saw any future for it, thinking GOG would be stuck selling 90s and early 2000s games forever. Resisting Steam and DRM seemed pointless.

Then in 2020, when I bought Cyberpunk on Steam, the RED Launcher told me I could get some wallpapers and junk if I logged in with a GOG account. There's a special "Cyberpunk 2077 Digital Goodies" pack for Steam owners of Cyberpunk 2077 basically. So I dug that old relic of an account up, went to GOG.com and saw Horizon Zero Dawn banner on the homepage. I really did not expect to see that here! I thought GOG was still stuck selling 20+ year old games and the only new games were 1st party. Suddenly fighting DRM stopped feeling so hopeless lol.

It took me a few months to decide whether "abandoning" so many Steam games and achievements, and whatnot to start over on GOG was worth it, but I decided that it was in the end. I have rebought what I could and now I have triple the amount of games here than I do on Steam lol. Obviously I still use Steam for massive games that are very unlikely to come to GOG anytime soon, such as GTA, Starfield, or Halo, or whatever, but GOG is my primary store now. Expanding to sell new games was the right move for them.

I am kicking myself for not checking out GOG at least once a year between 2013 and 2020. So many great games got delisted, which I've missed. Cryostasis, Riddick, Various Telltale games...

I learnt about GOG when they were holding a module contest for Neverwinter Nights. Being a member of the NWN community, I read about it and decided to participate, just for the fun of it (and the prospect of winning 5 games of my choice). And I did win, because all participants did, so I had to browse the whole catalogue in order to decide what games to pick as my trophy. I picked a digital copy of NWN, Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, The Longest Journey and Sanitarium, but I saw several more old games that I had missed out on back in the days (Gothic, Arx Fatalis, Syberia etc.). So I bought them, too. And that's how I got sucked in. Sneaky, sneaky.

Stil found a site listing the rules of the contest

September 2010 - the infamous "shut down" marketing stunt brought me here.
So, it worked as intended, I guess. ;o)

A German gaming mag had reported about that.

That brought GOG (back then still under the moniker "Good Old Games") on my radar.
Prior to that report, I had never heard of it.

I looked up the site, found it to be an amazing concept (bringing old games DRM-free to modern OSs), created an account, and claimed three free games ("Lure of the Temptress", "Teenagent", and "Beneath a Steel Sky").

About two weeks later, I bought my first two games here (quite hesitant, tbh - I mean, that stunt wasn't exactly deemed "professional").
A week after those, I bought the next...and then the next...

Well, and that was basically it...I never looked back.

First order:

Jul 12, 2010. I wanted to try Evil Genius (it wasn't good). But picked up some other things in the same order, like digital copies of a couple favorites: Lords of the Realm 1+2 and Lords of Magic.

I was here before The Shutdown. Before the brand switch. Before Galaxy. Before DRM...

GOG largely saved PC gaming for me. I was moving console-ward because of DRM on PC gaming. (Consoles had their physical copies still.)

Ran across a mention of it back when InsideMacGames was still alive - not sure whether it was through some news article or its forum - and found out that this scrappy new upstart was selling games such as Descent 1&2 that could be run via DOSBox/open source port. Back in the day when I was still trying to make Mac gaming work for me.

While things have definitely gotten better in that department I just got fed up by Apple continuing to intentionally or unintentionally break backwards compatibility; that hasn't changed and their continued flip-floppity view (and more-often-than-not complete indifference) of gaming shouldn't instill anyone with any kind of confidence. Anyway, IMG itself seems to have shuttered about a decade ago with a barely alive forum. I'm surprised their digital retailer is still around; the downward spiral of the original IMG kind of started when that one opened.

/ramble

That was my one and only purchase for about a year since I wasn't sure how long GOG was going to be around for at the time. Picked up some other DOSBox-able/WINE-able titles later like Pro Pinball, Settlers 2, Master of Orion 1&2, HoMM 3, Master of Magic, Stronghold.... I didn't really become a regular customer until I switched back to Windows sometime in 2011 - the year of EA and RollerCoaster Tycoon additions to the catalog! :)

I'm very glad GOG is still alive and kicking after all this time even if some things have changed. So many other online gaming stores have come and gone since or have become nothing more than Steam key resellers - hello, Gamersgate and HumbleBundle! It's still the best choice for DRM-free gaming no matter how compromised some people (somewhat rightfully) argue GOG has become.

2010 "I think it's about time I play Planescape Torment, hey these guys sell the game"

That's pretty much it lol, and then I stayed for the offline DRM-free installers format that we all love

Been here since 2009. I was aware of GOG super early on, but there weren't any games that interested me and I was pretty anti-digital distribution at the time, so I took a while to come around.

Things have changed just a little bit, I guess.

I'm pretty sure I stumbled across Good Old Games while searching in my web browser for Beneath a Steel Sky.

I learned about GoG in Pirate Bay.

I was pirating The Witcher and reading the comments on how to properly install it. One commenter claimed that he/she was from CD Projekt and was talking about how it's okay to pirate if you're just trying the game out or can't afford it yet, but encouraged us to legitimately purchase it if we can. IIRC, he or she included a link to GoG or just name-droped it. And now here I am. If that was really a CD Projekt team member then I'd say that's a really cool marketing style.

I recall a similar thread from a few years ago.

Was searching something Populous the Beginning related and found this unknown website selling the digital copy of the game for very cheap. Registered, tried to download a demo and worked, so bought the game, clicked the big misleading button and played the game.
Some time after, maybe days, weeks or months, I saw a comment (youtube maybe?) regarding GOG that was possible to download offline installers.

They live happy ever after.
The End.

I learned about GOG before its launch through word of mouth and I've been here since closed beta. I still have my earliest GOG installers from 9/9/08 (Fallout 1 and 2). Back in 2013 for the 5-year anniversary I won a giveaway for my account being older than 99.99% of users, by now that percentage might have another 9. The blast from the past page is a pleasant surprise and a real throwback, ironically.

I came at nearly the beginning (a little over a month after launch) and though I have over 1600 games here now (which means 17 pages on the game page) I still wish they'd change that to scrollable or at a minimum increase the games on each page so page reloads going from page to page doesn't take me a month to peruse my library lol.

And I remember well the first game I bought here. I'm sure given my avatar you'll be shocked at my first purchase. See screenshot, with games sorted by purchase date (newest to oldest) and be shocked.

ADDED: Second screenshot shows that very first purchase here, Nov 1, 2008.