I'd like to use this post to talk a little about the history of GameCoin, from it's beginnings to where we're at now.
GameCoin was originally launched on May 12th 2013 under the GMC ticker by a developer using the username
gamecoin. Unfortunately this launch was botched due to the developer using the exact same genesis block from Feathercoin or LiteCoin (I can't recall which off hand). This resulted in a successful 51% attack replacing the legitimately mined blockchain with that from the other coin.
The original developer did resolve this situation by adding some initial checkpoints and releasing an updated client but the damage had already been done. The difficulty was stuck above 1.0 and most of the miners abandoned it as a lost cause making the hash rates plummet. I had personally mined about 100 blocks legitimately so I was reluctant to give up on it, the same was true for a few other miners so we worked together to mine at what was for us (solo mining) a high difficulty. Somewhere along the line
tyrion70 set up a pool so we were able to work together to bring the difficulty down after a few weeks of mining.
During this time we all came to the conclusion that having difficulty retargets at 2016 blocks apart is not necessarily a good thing. We'd all experienced just how damaging this can be as we had to mine at too high a difficulty for the size of the network for several weeks.
jayo89 had already made some cosmetic changes and started a new repository and I took it upon myself to improve the difficulty algorithm based upon changes made to MinCoin at around the same time as this.
tyrion70 once again stepped in to compile some updated wallets.
The hard fork for this difficulty algorithm came into force at block 25200 and as I type this there are 48695 blocks so the network has been ticking along nicely ever since this point. The only real issue has been the peers with 300K blocks just don't seem to want to give up the ghost resulting in the client displaying that it is trying to sync with them. This is merely an annoyance and does not impact the functionality of the wallet due to the many checkpoints keeping everyone on the correct chain.
UPDATE: GameCoin v0.8.1 should resolve the issue with bad peers once the deadline for upgrading (August 15th 2013 at 00:00:00 (GMT)) is reached.That pretty much brings us up to date, if you mined in the early days of GameCoin and kept your wallet.dat file your coins should still exist. All you need to do is update to the latest client version and you'll be good to go.