As our catalog gets bigger and better every week, it’s easy to lose track of some of the awesome games that we have to offer. Of course Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and some other of our most popular titles will always get a lot of attention, but GOG has many more classics to bring you. To help encourage you to explore the dustier reaches of GOG’s catalog, we’re going to be offering a promo on the first and third Wednesday of every month. Think of it as a curated promo on some of GOG’s favorite titles that you may not have played. Whether we’re encouraging you to explore incredible new worlds or inviting you to see how a titanic series got its start, we think every game we’re going to be offering on our GOG Gem Promos will be an excellent title, and we hope you give them all a try.

For our inaugural GOG Gem Promo, we’d like to introduce you to a serious friend of ours. His name is Sam. Released by Croatian developers CroTeam in 2002 when games were becoming ever more “realistic” (by which most developers seemed to mean “brown”), Serious Sam: The First Encounter was a throwback to the button-mashing, alien-killing days of shooters gone bye. Saturated with color and packed with so many bizarre enemies (headless monsters with bombs for hands, anyone?) that your screen would fill with literally hundreds of them, Serious Sam’s combination of gameplay and wacky world-building made it a huge success. The First Encounter has been available on GOG since August of 2010. While it’s not the HD version you can find elsewhere, the gameplay is untouched, and for $2.39 you owe it to yourself to skip that post-lunch latte and get serious.

This promo will run from 12:00 noon GMT today all the way to 11.59 GMT tomorrow. Grab your copy of Serious Sam: The First Encounter while it’s hot, and stay tuned for our next promo in two weeks!

(Hint: It won’t be Serious Sam: The Second Encounter)