GOG COM

STUDIO PROFILE

This is the tale of how a small startup company in Poland created a global e-commerce business, rescuing, sometimes fixing, and re-releasing good old PC games online. Discover how Gog.com is preserving retro gaming with a genuine passion for the art and its cultural significance

WORDS BY RICHARD HEWISON

» Marcin Paczynski is GOG.com’s senior business developer.

» Maciej Gołebiewski is GOG.com’s VP of publishing and monetisation. »

Buyinggenuine, boxed copies of computer-games software in post-communist Poland in the late-Eighties, throughout the Nineties and into the early Noughties wasn’t easy, and it certainly wasn’t cheap. “The main problem with computers and software back then was that they were very, very expensive,” explains Marcin Paczynski, GOG.com’s senior business developer. “Typically, you would be spending about 30 percent of your monthly salary on buying an original boxed game, so in Poland it was got around by software piracy.”

Local flea markets openly sold pirated games on tapes, floppy disks and later on CD-ROMs, and for many young Polish gamers, they rarely saw a boxed copy and often weren’t even aware that the pirated versions were pirated, with many people thinking that the boxed copies were special editions of the individually bagged CD-ROMs they were buying. “I remember putting the very first bootleg game I bought into our CD-ROM drive at home, and it shattered because of the humidity inside the little plastic bag it came in,” says Maciej Gołebiewski, GOG.com’s VP of publishing and monetisation.

Back in the early Nineties, Polish university graduate Marcin Iwinski was keen to try and bring some legitimacy into software distribution in his homeland, and he established a new company to do just that. In the mid-Nineties, Marcin formed CD Projekt with longterm school friend Michał Kicinski, and they managed to persuade US publisher Interplay to let them not only officially release the RPG Baldur’s Gate in Poland, but to reverseengineer the game so they could add localised Polish text and use well-known Polish actors to record digitised speech. The official localised copy cost an extra 50 percent over the cost to buy the pirated version, but not only did the buyer get a game spread across five CDs, but they got a proper box, and all the extra highquality paraphernalia as well. The experience was totally different to what Polish game players were used to. “It was really impressive, and it changed the mindset of a lot of people in Poland to move from pirated copies to original ones,” says Marcin Paczynski. “The quality of what you got in the box… the manual, the map… it was way better than buying cheap CDs from a flea market.”