Wanna play out-of-print PC games you can't find without paying an arm and a leg to a bunch of price-gouging hucksters on Amazon and eBay? You may want to bookmark a little site that's about to launch this August in beta called GOG.com.
GOG, which stands for "Good Old Games," appears to be an attempt to offer a glut of old-school PC goodies for on-demand download, ranging just for starters from stuff like MDK and Operation Flashpoint to Fallout and Freespace 2.
All XP and Vista compatible, and all completely DRM free. As the site says, "you buy it, you keep it." Buy once, download many. Anywhere, on any PC, without intrusive, privacy-compromising "go-online-and-register-every-time-you-play" schemes.
All relatively cheap, too. We're talking just $6 to $10 a pop.
According to the press release:
GOG.com is poised to become the center of the classic-games universe with a huge community section including forums, user reviews and ratings, as well as insightful commentary and editorials from some of the industry?s most beloved writers. A closed public beta of the site is scheduled for launch on August 1st, and excited old-school gamers can sign up for more info and a chance to enter the beta by visiting GOG.com.
GOG.com has already lined up agreements with such publishers as Interplay and Codemasters to make their games available on the site. Among the titles those companies are bringing to the site are in-demand classics like Fallout, Freespace 2, Operation Flashpoint: Game of the Year Edition and TOCA Race Driver 3. Negotiations are in progress with several other publishers, with the ultimate goal of GOG.com offering a comprehensive collection of classic PC games from the 80s, 90s and 2000s.
?Our main goal is to create a user-friendly site with the best classic PC games for a price that might be considered impossible to achieve,? said Adam Oldakowski, Managing Director of GOG.com. ?The people behind GOG.com are gamers and we all know how difficult it is to find a lot of classic games. So we?ve started building a great games catalogue, gotten rid of the copy protection that gamers hate so much, optimized the games to work on modern operating systems, and made them cheap enough that piracy seems like a rip-off. It?s so easy to buy, download and install a game and then get deeply involved in the community; we?re very confident that gamers will absolutely love the site.?
Sign me up, then give me just about everything from Origin Systems and Looking Glass Studios, fast as you can and pretty please. The Ultima series? Wing Commander? System Shock? Terra Nova? Thief: The Dark Project? Ultima Underworld? Wings of Glory? Privateer? Strike Commander?
Assuming the beta goes well, the service is poised to officially launch sometime in September.
Sound off, all you legacy PC gamers. What else would you like to see a service like this resurrect?
