I joined at the same time, due to the same giveaway ;)

I then picked up Torchlight for free in June 2013 and started buying games two days later, the first one being the absolute best game of all times: Alpha Centauri.

Not long after that I started working on scripts converting the GOG installers into native Linux packages, starting with Planescape: Torment (bought with all other classic Infinity Engine games) and Caesar 3 (bought alongside the other Impression Games city builders provided on GOG at the time). I have been working on these since then, and that turned into ./play.it.

Since 2009 when I discovered I could buy games from a more distant past no longer available. Back then I wasn't so concerned about DRM free and still happily bought the bulk of my games on Steam.

I remember the "shutdown" event - worst marketing ever. Or who knows, maybe it's a stroke of genius given I still remember that campaign along with "happiness is a cigar called hamlet" and "vitalite" (shrug).

A few years later as the tech world eroded into "rentsville" I switched exclusively to buying from GOG - I now have over 1100 games on GOG, finally eclipsing Steam (where I have 700odd I think). Hell, I even stopped buying Humble Bundles as they were all steam keys (not to mention Humble itself went so badly downhill with dark patterns and a general "unpleasant" feel once the founders sold out).

As for _how_ I found GOG - I can no longer remember. As the very first game I bought was Screamer, I can only assume that I felt nostalgic to play that puppy but either couldn't get hold of a CD or the CD I once owned was either to badly damaged or didn't run on a modern OS. So that probably means I Google'd it. Something else from the past as I stopped using _that_ a fair few years ago too.

[As an aside, this forum feels like it is from 2009 too, and that's not really a good thing]

Because it sorta, kinda actually is. Have a throwback every day! ;)

GOG seems to be in no hurry to address this either. Other than some maintenance updates to stop it from breaking completely, they've done jack-all with the forum since the site's inception. At this point they really ought to just archive the whole damn thing and wholesale replace the forum with something brand new.

10 years since September 17, 2023. I was just bored and was looking for alternatives to Steam and so I found GOG.

September 2012, first purchase was Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri™ Planetary Pack. I remember playing the main game and also wanting to try the expansion and found it availible on gog.
Not really sure anymore how i became aware of gog, maybe a forum post from my wow raiding days.

November 2010
I think it was a free game being offered here that brought me to this place, I could be wrong tough, it's been 13 years since then

And all the better for it. Newer forums suck: embedded images? Emoji? Animated gifs?

"Discourse" (the forum software) is among the worst. God I hate that UX: it hijacks your browser's keyboard shortcuts, it's ajaxy "dynamic load as you scroll" to make reading all the harder, it has achievements (gag) and so on.

There's plenty of room for improvement, but so long as we remain closer to this than that.

I'd been seeing it around the time while browsing on Abandonia and Home of the Underdogs, but thought it was a shady band of missionaries or something.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I'm on a fresh computer wanting to play old games without having to bother faffing around with scratched old physical media from 1996. And I think it started from there.

Ohhhh, the fastness and unclutter... It's a shame websites like this are being superseeded with, hum, nu-GOG... The place where I need to point the mouse cursor either to the left or rightmost place on the screen, so I can actually see the games list instead of geting pop-ups.

When people keep saying the GOG forum is bad and should be changed, be carefull what you wish for.

Did I mention the old website is really fast and no clutter at all?

2018. One of my friends had told me a year or two before that that I could claim a free digital copy of The Witcher using my physical copy code.

Other than that I can't specifically remember what brought me here. Just pottering around online, I guess.

Since Sept. 2008. Got here from an article in Retrogamer, and am here for primarily good old games

Well, I made the account in May 2011, May 28 if I'm to go by the date when the automatic freebies show up as "ordered", but I had been keeping an eye on them pretty much since launch, when believe it or not I saw a little article about them in a newspaper from here. So I jumped on the computer to check out the place and then sent an excited message about it to a friend, basically saying finally something that may be worth supporting in this rotten industry... Only to have her say that yep, other friends of hers had been talking about it recently too.
And I remained that excited and something of a GOG "missionary" all through those early years, but as you can see it took quite some time before actually making an account, and even longer before I could buy something, no cards and all, so needed something I could buy with cash and kept pestering them over and over for such an option until they finally added Paysafecard at the end of 2013 and I made my first actual purchase on Dec 18, 2013...
And then it all went to hell in a handbasket along with the "Good News" (TM) of Feb 2014, and it's just been downhill ever since.

I don't know about brand new, but at least newer. More importantly, something that they didn't make themselves.

Thankfully, there's no shortage of forum software that is both free and open source. Including PHPBB. But for the personal choice I've seen, the Dfeed (the D programming language's own forum) is pretty hard to beat.