GOG's time machine sale lets the seconds tick down, and then back up again

GOG do enjoy their quirky sales. Their last weird one, the Fall Insomnia sale , was a stressful reminder that time is slipping beyond our control, that our frail forms can't physically experience all the joy in the world, and that everything will one day be reduced to naught. It was a fun time. The new Time Machine sale has a more empowering angle, letting users do battle against each other and time itself.

"Fasten your seatbelts," write GOG , who apparantly expect people to be reading this from their cars, "and prepare for a fascinating ride to the early days of PC gaming and back again, with 30 excellent titles selected from the years 1983-2013, available up to 90% off." Look, seriously people, don't read websites while driving a car. That's basic stuff.

The gimmick here is that you can extend how long each game is on sale. Buy a game, and its sale time extends for three seconds, or you can choose to manually extend it by a single second. Alternatively, you can manually reduce it, taking a second off to ensure less time stands between you and the next year/game. Even better, you can sit on the home page and watch time ticking away, and then ticking back up again, and then ticking away slightly faster than it did before.

Because time is a fickle master, as of writing we're already into 1995. That means there are eighteen "years" of deals left to look forward to. Essentially, we've got an entire childhood of sales remaining. This is weird.

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.