Hey GOG users,

Is there any way to search GOG games by release date? For example, search for games released before 2000. I'd love to find old games that I played as a kid, but without knowing exact game titles it's hard to find what I want.

Thanks!
Adam

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/removed_search_page_filter_workarounds

Very good question. The information is there in principle but is GOG capable of letting you search and display that in a meaningful way? I doubt it, their website's functionality is quite limited, but let's try (and fail).

First, go to the games page (https://www.gog.com/games), tabs Everything sounds about right, filters on the left side are not helpful, sort by at the right side may be something (date added and oldest first sound promising). Date added seems to be newest to oldest. So we go to the last page (55, https://www.gog.com/games?page=55&sort=date) and see that the oldest added game (first game on GOG?) is MDK which was released (according to the game info page) on April 1997. But date added is not the same as released. So sort by "oldest first" which hopefully refers to (original) release date (and having in mind that real classic gems like Baldur's Gate and others are hidden in some kind of Enhanced whatever editions on GOG which might have not the original release date but a different one). The first entry of "oldest first" is Hitman 2 from October 2002 and the last entry in this list is Field of Glory II from March 2018. Okay, this probably means that GOG does not have any games pre 2002 (at least in this list).

I'm out of options at this point and conclude that GOG does not offer even that simple function and in general is kind of broken ("oldest first" should definitely not start at 2002).

There used to be some external, fan made database which may be much better at keeping track of the game meta data than GOG itself (which sounds rather embarrassing for GOG if you ask me). Let's look at GOGWiki (https://www.gogwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page). Its goal was to document every game published on GOG and it is powered by Mediawiki which features categories which might be used to filter for release date. And indeed there is a category called original release date ([url=https://www.gogwiki.com/wiki/Category:Original_release_date]https://www.gogwiki.com/wiki/Category:Original_release_date[/url]) which can be used to browse games on GOG by release year (so you still have to open a page for every year before 2000 in your case but that is better than nothing). Unfortunately it seems like GOGWiki is a bit outdated (last release category is 2015), so you may see only a subset of what is available or some games might already be pulled from GOG in the meantime. Better than nothing (that is what you get on GOG itself) though. There used to be another really cool database magog.com (or so) of which I'm sure that it could do anything you can ever dream of (search for any logical combination or any conditions of game meta data including regional prices), but the creator could not afford the time anymore and I cannot find it anymore.

As a summary: GOG is not smart/interested enough to implement proper search while fans do not have enough time to update external info about it and that's why there is no way to get that information easily.

Somebody with enough time and talent could probably write a small Python script that scrapes all the currently available GOG game pages with some tool, parse the content and produces an Excel (or similar) sheet out of it so people can play with it.

Removing that feature was one of the worst changes they made to the store.
Fortunately there are people like kbnrylaec to find some effective way to solve things...

MaGog was the name of the service; the site it was (and is still) hosted on is an-ovel.com.
And MaGog isn't abandoned, but it is in "legacy mode", which means mrkgnao -- the GOGnard who created and still maintains it -- had the system stop adding new games after a certain point (though it still tracks changes to games already in the catalogue before the cutoff date), so it's of rather limited use.
Also, he didn't cease to have it update the database with new releases because he didn't have the time (though that may have been a contributing factor), so much as because he had ideological objections to the direction GOG seemed to be going in.

Also, in case you're not aware, there is another user-created site that seeks to track GOG games (and movies, to a lesser extent). But GOGdb (or however its creator would like it styled :P ) doesn't have nearly the feature set that MaGog has, and most of the information it provides isn't quite as end-user-oriented, in my opinion.
Among the features it lacks is a way to search by anything other than title, or to sort or further filter search results at all. So MaGog is still your best option for a list of games sorted by when they were added to GOG.

Thanks for the corrections. It seems about the only part that I got right were the incredibly powerful search capabilities of MaGog.

It's OK -- not everyone can be bored enough, often enough, to hang around this forum as much as I have. =)