Remember the Good Old Games? Well, we do.  We recently sat down with representative Lukasz Kukawski to talk about some of the ideas behind the extremely promising web store — also, gaming in general.  The main idea behind the site being; make available classic hit titles at affordable prices.

I bet that you’ve been asked this questions multiple times, but what was the teams main inspiration behind Good Old Games?

That’s easy, the main inspiration was to offer gamers the classic PC games again. The idea behind GOG came to life after a discussion by CD Projekt’s (GOG Ltd. mother company) management guys about old games. They came to a conclusion they would really love to play such gems from the past like Fallout, Duke Nukem 3D, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter or System Shock, but it’s almost impossible to buy them in retail or on on-line auctions. Even if you have a stash of old games in your basement, still you can’t be sure if they run on your modern, lightning fast Windows 7 system. So they decided to offer gamers around the world a chance to legally buy games which ruled back in the day, optimized to run on modern operating systems and filled with extras like soundtracks, artworks, guides and more. And the best way to reach a worldwide community is by using the internet. By combining these two ideas, GOG has been born – a digital distribution platform with classic PC games.

For people who aren’t fortunate enough to own high-end PCs, how have you guys adapted to them and, if not, how do you plan too?

Well, actually we didn’t have to adapt to them as most of the games are 5, 10, 15 or even 20 years old. You don’t have to have a powerful PC to play the classics which millions of gamers enjoyed back in the days. Actually we’ve launched GOG in a very favorable circumstances as netbooks started to become very popular, which is still the case. Most of the games offered on GOG will run flawlessly on netbooks and thanks to the DRM-free nature of GOG, you can enjoy those titles without having access to internet like during a flight, on vacation etc.

Do you guys believe social interaction, such as Twitter, Facebook, as the stepping stone behind your recent success?

I believe the main factor is our offering which is unique for us, but I’m also sure social media like Twitter and Facebook sure helped us. We’re using word of mouth as one of the main strategies to promote the service and it works for us pretty well. Our approach to digital distribution – DRM-free games in reasonable prices with bonus materials – gained a huge group of fans and it’s still growing. These satisfied customers use Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs, etc. to recommend GOG as the place to get classic PC games and as we know personal recommendations are the most effective. We’ve made a service which we’d like to use ourselves as gamers and the growing success of GOG shows that it was a good way to do it. We respect our users and they feel like recommending us to other gamers and that’s great!

Technically speaking. Have you guys compressed any of your titles, or have you guys left them as is for downloading.

The games are packed in a custom GOG installer, so the file you download from our server after purchasing is the installer. It helps us to provide users a hassle-free experience. You don’t have to know how to tweak a game to run under DOSBox or how to make a Win98 game run on your Windows Vista, you just download the file, instal the game and play it. Of course the game itself isn’t deprived of anything, it’s the exact same game that you have played when it was originally released.

With the recent release of StarCraft II, have you guys tried to obtain the rights to publish the original installment?

Blizzard has it’s own store where you can buy the original StarCraft in both digital and retail version, so they’re not actually very interested in selling it via GOG.

Do you guys believe that Steam is your most impactful competitor, seeing that they also home many good old school titles?

Steam is the biggest and most successful digital download platform out there, no discussion. But still they are focused on new games and that’s where they are the most popular. If you want to check for some classic PC games you’re going to check GOG or some abandonware sites.

At first, when we launched the biggest competitor wasn’t Steam, but actually the abandonware sites. But when we started to contact the owners of those sites and telling them about GOG they were happy that someone has finally took care of classic games. After all most of the guys behind abandonware are huge fans of old games and they offer the titles as abandonware downloads to save them from oblivion. We’ve managed to turn many abandonware sites into our affiliates and they turned from our biggest competition into our biggest partners.

So yeah, we’re not competing with Steam as we found our own niche and we’re trying to get as much as possible from it and I can tell that there’s still a lot of potential in old games and old brands. After all, we call those games classics.

How do you feels about HD remakes, like Deux Ex: Human Revolution?

As far as I know, Deus Ex: Human Revolution won’t be a classic HD remake, but a continuation of the renown series, but I understand what you mean. ;D I think it’s a good thing. Dusting off the old, great brands by making remakes or continuations or by making them available again (for example via GOG) is good as thanks to this older gamers can revive their memories and new audiences can get to know titles which they heard of but never had a chance to actually play. Music and movies industries cherish their past, save it from oblivion, while gaming industry seems to rush into the future and don’t care about the past, while there are lots of gems in the PC gaming history that are worth remembering.

Can you please describe Good Old Games to us?

Good Old Games, or GOG.com, is a digital distribution platform with cheap and DRM-free classic PC games. We’ve got such great classics like Fallout, Duke Nukem 3D, Freespace 2, Outcast, Arcanum, Heroes of Might and Magic, Beyond Good & Evil (and 200+ titles more) for either $5.99 or $9.99, no matter where you live. DRM-free means we don’t have any copy protection in our games – when you buy a game on GOG you can download it anytime you want as many times as you need, you can burn it on a CD, install on any PC you own and you don’t have to be online to play. What’s even better every game is guaranteed to work on modern operating systems and comes with additional materials like soundtracks, guides, artworks, wallpapers and more.

But GOG isn’t just an ordinary digital outlet. Our goal is to make it the ultimate destination for all classic games fans, that’s why every game has it’s own forum where you can meet people who share the same passion for old games as you. We publish retrospective articles and interviews with developers which bring you the idea how the game was made and what decisions developers had to make during the development.

But you don’t have to listen to me, just visit GOG.com, create a free account and download one (or all) of three free games to check the GOG experience. See you on the forums!

Alex Mercer may not remember if he was a hero or a villain, but do you remember the trailer that was ‘leaked’ a month ago? Well, it looks like that trailer has found its way to CES, in Las Vegas, this year and, as I digress into this matter, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

At the end of the trailer (shown below), there was a simply advert saying that newest release target for Prototype, which reads ‘Summer 2009′. That’s it. That was the newest release target for the title, but also in the trailer it revealed some powerful, and rather painful, powers that haven’t been shown before, here take a look.

Note: to view video in better quality go here and click in ‘watch in HD’.

Okay. It’s not really ready yet, but it will be making its way onto a console near you very soon, Nov. 19. As of right now, the update is sitting in a sever farm at Microsoft Headquarters just waiting to make its way down your Ethernet cable straight into your 360, but from this video, after the update is complete, you’ll be truly into a the New Xbox Experience. That’s geared to any genre that makes you a gamer. The update is set to bring a profound change that will bring a new ever lasting appeal to a bigger audience.

The men of the 101st Airborne Division are really up for a fight as Staff Sergeant Matt Baker is going led them through a fight that many still can’t forget. Lucky for them you can help them through this fight and for all you PC fans who don’t know what weapons they will be needing to compete their mission today Ubisoft revealed the system requirements for that said game, Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway,  here they are:

Operating Systems: Windows® XP SP3/Windows Vista SP1 only.
Processor: 2.6 GHz dual-core or 3 GHz for Intel Pentium D.
RAM: 2 GB Recommended (1GB minimum).
Graphics Card: 128 MB DirectX® 9.0 compliant & Shader 3.0 enabled.
Sound Card: Any DirectX® 9.0 or 10.0 compatible card.
Optical Drive: 4x dual-layer DVD-ROM
Online: Broadband with at least 384 Kbps upstream.

Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway will be released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on September 23, 2008 in North America and Microsoft Windows version PC’s the following a week on September 30, 2008.