GOG Releases “First Five Years” Video

In its first five years GOG has given away more than 18 million games and been visited by more than 50 million gamers.

Times flies is one of those old, cliched adages that, sadly, tends to be true. One day you wake up and suddenly you’re an old fart with a bad back, a mortgage and life full of memories that you want to relive. When it comes to videogames at least, there’s arguably no one better at helping with that than GOG. The digital retailer, which has accumulated a library of hundreds of retro and indie titles since it first opened its doors, celebrated its fifth birthday last year and now, with 2014 beginning, has released a video to commemorate its first five years.

The video features CD Projekt’s Marcin Iwinski along GOG’s managing and creative directors Guillaume Rambourg and Piotr Karwowski discussing and reminiscing about the retailer’s formation and their memories of its growth over the last half-decade. According to Karwowski, very few of the people involved in its formative days had much experience with digital distribution. Good Old Games was, in turn, actually worked on in secret for “nearly a year” before its actual launch. Even so, he believes that the company’s inexperience may have been a boon in the long run. “Not having people with knowledge was kind of probably the biggest blessing for the project,” he said. “We just were doing it in a way that we as gamers would love to use ourselves.”

The video also shared some of the site’s stats from the past few years. For instance, it revealed that since its launch GOG has given away more than 18 million games and is privy to more than 2 million visitors a month. This adds up over its many years to a whopping 50 million gamers from more than 190 different countries. In short, it’s been an interesting and busy five years for GOG and we look forward to seeing where it will go in the next five to come.