First, how did the idea for GOG come about at CD Projekt?

Sometime early in 2007, as the story has been relayed to me, some of the guys were seemingly outraged that they couldn't find a lot of their favorite games in stores. They had to resort to paying ridiculous prices on eBay or some other nefarious means to get classic games. Even when they managed to get those games, though, they often found that they couldn't run them on today's PCs. Thus begins the fairytale that brings us to today and the announcement of GOG.com.

There's certainly a lot of games that could be eligible for GOG. How is the company determining what games will be appropriate for the service?

It's a pretty simple process: if we think of a game we want, we start thinking about how to approach the publisher that holds the rights... do they have other games we want? Ultimately our goal is to have all of the best PC games, so we've got an exhaustive list of prospective titles that we're working through. We do want to focus on good games, though, so we've generally got a certain level of quality we're aiming for.

How hard was it to get the original publishers to offer DRM free versions of the games at such a low cost?

It's a mixed bag – some publishers are really excited to start making money from their old games, while others are quite hesitant because of the lack of DRM and/or the low price point. I think that we can point to the public's reception of our announcement, and then eventually to really strong sales, to convince any that were reluctant to bring their games to GOG.com. Gamers are ready to embrace the idea, and I think that it'll be gamers that will do the best job of convincing those publishers.

How hard is it to get some of these older games to run well on Windows XP and Vista?

It's not always easy, that's for sure. We have a great programming team, though, and they're being as crafty as can be to make sure everything works. When possible we'll work with the game masters, but often we just have to use some sort of programming magic I don't quite understand to ensure compatibility. We've created custom installers for each of our games, which help to solve some of the compatibility issues. We'll also rely on feedback during the beta to make sure things work on a lot of different hardware configurations.

What other features will GOG have besides the downloading of classic games?

Our community is going to be a major focus. We'll draw people in, of course, with the games, and hopefully keep them coming back with some great retrospective articles and developer interviews from excellent writers, as well as a pretty extensive community element – we'll have forums for every game and will allow players to submit all sorts of content themselves. We'll be highlighting cool game content and mods, we'll release professional-quality game guides, soundtracks and a bunch of other stuff. We don't want it to just be some site you go to when you see a news post somewhere – bookmark it, damnit! One other cool thing is our affiliate program – we basically let anyone sign up as an affiliate and earn a pretty high royalty from each user they refer. The businessy guys showed me a chart of how quickly the payments go up, and a lot of people could make some good money with it.

Will CD Projekt use GOG to distribute its own current and future games?

Our focus with GOG.com is definitely on classic games, as opposed to bringing new titles to the site. There's a possibility that in the future we may use the delivery mechanism to bring our own titles out digitally, but we're quite happy with our other digital distribution partners. They do a great job, and we're not planning to take their business away.

About how many games will be available when GOG launches later this year?

We're currently shooting for between 70 and 100 games at launch. I'd personally love for that number to go up; we just need to bring some more publishers onboard.

What sort of future features will the web site gain after its launch?

Oh come on, John – we just announced the site! I don't want to go into too much depth about our future plans; we'll focus on the existing site first. That being said, after launch we'll start implementing a lot more community features, more comprehensive user profiles, community achievements like "Flamebait" for the most negatively-reviewed forum posts or whatever, a download manager... we've got lots of plans, but we're focusing on getting the site going for launch.

PC gaming as a whole is moving toward a download model, much like music already has. Do you feel that in a few years time retail sales of PC games will become a thing of the past?

I think that retail has already become less crucial than it was, say, two years ago, but I don't know that it'll ever go away entirely. I'm one of those people that really likes to have a disc and a manual in hand, and I love me some Collector's Editions. That being said, absolutely, I think we're only a couple of years away from online sales eclipsing those at retail – it's much more financially rewarding for companies, given the higher revenue with digital sales, and for gamers it's just much more convenient... not that I don't like getting off my ass and out of the house once in awhile... or do I?

Finally is there anything else you wish to say about GOG?

That probably covers it; I'll start sounding like a soulless marketing imp if I rant on. I do want to actually thank every single person who's said or written anything positive about the site since we announced it. The public's support of GOG.com will show hesitant publishers that they don't have to be afraid of the no-DRM thing or low prices – gamers want to play your games and give you money.