Ah, I wouldn't have found them in software shops either, they were sold at newstands along with newspapers, kinda hard to miss. :)

I still have an old copy of PC Gamer somewhere (advertised as "the number 1 magazine in the States!"). I'm not going to search for it now, but it had a preview of Warcraft 2, so it must have been from '93-'94. The translation was extremely poor, but I bought them a few times since their CDs had much better content than our national counterpart offered.
While I don't really know how popular it was in the US (and even then, I guess it differed from state to state), I doubt they would have expanded into Europe if it hadn't been successful back home.

As for relasing games, I know it's not something that happens only here (or used to, in our case: it was mostly a way to gain the edge over the competition in an extremely saturated market). Even here on GOG you can read that some german or polish magazines have a big relase sometimes.

Semi-guilty there.

I mean, I am gonna play them but I prefer to keep it to one or two games at a time. I have quite a queue already. It's not as if I just buy them and leave them to rot.

Maybe it's nostalgia, but I find the oldies to have this irresistible charm to them. For that reason I don't particularly care about the newer games (with some exceptions like The Witcher). But don't get me wrong; I have no ill feelings towards gog for starting to include modern games. At the rate with which gog adds new titles to its library, there is more than enough to enjoy.