![]() | |
![]() Home of The Underdogs as of 14 May 2006 | |
Type of site | Abandonware video games |
---|---|
Owner | Sarinee Achavanuntakul |
URL | http://www.the-underdogs.org (archived) Defunct; multiple revivals exist (see below) |
Registration | Not required |
Launched | September 1998/April 2009 |
Current status | Original website defunct; succeeded by multiple third-party mirrors/revivals |
Content license | CC BY-NC-SA [1] |
Home of the Underdogs (often called HotU) is an abandonware archive [2] founded by Sarinee Achavanuntakul, [3] in October 1998.
Before shutting down the original version in 2009, the site provided reviews for over 5,300 games and offered downloads of software and manuals for a number of games that were no longer commercially available. This allowed it to be a valuable resource to players who lost the original discs or manuals. While a majority of games available on the site were for DOS or Microsoft Windows, the site also contained a section with games for other platforms. Where downloads for these games were provided, they were usually present in formats compatible with emulators. The site also had scans of several gamebook series, many of them complete. In addition to commercial titles, the site contained hundreds of freeware titles. [4]
Achavanuntakul, a Thai journalist, had been in the United States at that time and wanted to play MicroProse's 1989 title Sword of the Samurai , as her copy had fallen apart. However, by 1998, MicroProse no longer was selling any copies of the title, forcing Achavanuntakul to seek out a copy through an abandonware webring, eventually coming across the title offered to be played through emulation. She was surprised that other older, popular titles such as Infocom and Quantum Quality Productions were not available through these sites, and took it upon herself to launch "Home of the Underdogs" that October, a more permanent site for users to obtain abandonware. Initially, she had about 20 games offered but within a few months, had gained help from others to expand to about 80 games. [5]
Around that time, her web hosting service Xoom took down the site without warning, given the issue of copyrights with abandonware. She relaunched early in 1999, now providing the files under a .bmp extension rather than .zip to avoid attracting Xoom's notice. By the time the site had gotten to around 400 titles, Xoom permanently deleted the site, but Achavanuntakul had many offers for help from users around the globe to provide a more permanent hosting solution. At about the same time, her site gained attention from the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), the former name of the current Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the video game industry's trade organization. The IDSA saw the offering of abandonware as a copyright violation for those publishers they represented, and Achavanuntakul complied with their requests by removing links to the software offered to otherwise keep the site going. [5]
In January 2006, due to new responsibilities at work, Achavanuntakul had to step off running the site, allowing other admins to continue to maintain it. [5]
In early 2009, Home of the Underdogs had difficulty maintaining funding for its hosting duties, which led to the website's shutdown. [6] As the database of HOTU was released under a CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license in March 2009, [1] [7] a team had been able to rehost the website as hotud.org by September 2009. [8] At the same time, the site established a partnership with GOG.com, a digital storefront that offered digital rights management-free games, to promote and offer some of the classic games that Underdogs had through GOG.com. [9] Despite difficulties with providing direct access to abandonware, the new maintainers tried to reproduce the site's databases and reviews for these early video games. [5] [10] The hotud.org site maintainers warned in February 2014 that financing for the servers was becoming difficult and they may need to take it offline. [11] Hotud.org went offline in June 2017. [12]
A new version of the website became available at homeoftheunderdogs.net since September 2009 and remains active as of January 2022. [13]
While the legitimacy of abandonware with respect to copyrights remains in question, several game developers who had designed the games that were offered at "Home of the Underdogs", such as Chris Crawford, had written to Achavanuntakul to thank her for helping their games to be introduced to new players. [5] Several more recent game developers including Derek Yu and Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw credit Home of the Underdogs for helping them to get interested in video game development. [5] The site was considered critical towards helping with digital preservation, since most publishers at the time did not keep materials of games that they had taken out of print. [5]
Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines freeware unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the freeware it offers. For instance, modification, redistribution by third parties, and reverse engineering are permitted by some publishers but prohibited by others. Unlike with free and open-source software, which are also often distributed free of charge, the source code for freeware is typically not made available. Freeware may be intended to benefit its producer by, for example, encouraging sales of a more capable version, as in the freemium and shareware business models.
Warez is a common computing and broader cultural term referring to pirated software that is distributed via the Internet. Warez is used most commonly as a noun, a plural form of ware, and is intended to be pronounced like the word wares. The circumvention of copy protection (cracking) is an essential step in generating warez, and based on this common mechanism, the software-focused definition has been extended to include other copyright-protected materials, including movies and games. The global array of warez groups has been referred to as "The Scene", deriving from its earlier description as "the warez scene". Distribution and trade of copyrighted works without payment of fees or royalties generally violates national and international copyright laws and agreements. The term warez covers supported as well as unsupported (abandonware) items, and legal prohibitions governing creation and distribution of warez cover both profit-driven and "enthusiast" generators and distributors of such items.
Leisure Suit Larry is an adult-themed sex comedy video game series created by Al Lowe. It was published by Sierra from 1987 to 2009, then by Codemasters starting in 2009. The first six Leisure Suit Larry titles, along with Magna Cum Laude and Love for Sail Mobile, were distributed by Vivendi Games, while Box Office Bust and Reloaded were distributed by Codemasters. Currently, the games are being published and distributed by Assemble Entertainment.
Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion Virtual Machine (ScummVM) is a set of game engine recreations. Originally designed to play LucasArts adventure games that use the SCUMM system, it also supports a variety of non-SCUMM games by companies like Revolution Software and Adventure Soft. It was originally written by Ludvig Strigeus. Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, ScummVM is free software.
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is the trade association of the video game industry in the United States. It was formed in April 1994 as the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA) and renamed on July 21, 2003. It is based in Washington, D.C. Most of the top publishers in the gaming world are members of the ESA.
In computing, a clone is hardware or software that is designed to function in exactly the same way as another system. A specific subset of clones are remakes, which are revivals of old, obsolete, or discontinued products.
Digital distribution, also referred to as content delivery, online distribution, or electronic software distribution, among others, is the delivery or distribution of digital media content such as audio, video, e-books, video games, and other software.
Retrogaming, also known as classic gaming and old school gaming, is the playing and collection of obsolete personal computers, consoles, and video games. Usually, retrogaming is based upon systems that are outmoded or discontinued, although ported retrogaming allows games to be played on modern hardware via ports or compilations. It is typically for nostalgia, preservation, or authenticity. A new game could be retro styled, such as an RPG with turn-based combat and pixel art in isometric camera perspective.
Penguin Software was a computer software and video game publisher from Geneva, Illinois that produced graphics and application software and games for the Apple II, Macintosh, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari 8-bit, and Atari ST computers. They produced the graphics programs Graphics Magician and Complete Graphics System, graphic adventure games such as the Transylvania series, arcade-style games like Spy's Demise, and role-playing video games such as Xyphus.
Public-domain software is software that has been placed in the public domain, in other words, software for which there is absolutely no ownership such as copyright, trademark, or patent. Software in the public domain can be modified, distributed, or sold even without any attribution by anyone; this is unlike the common case of software under exclusive copyright, where licenses grant limited usage rights.
Abandonia is an abandonware website, focusing mainly on showcasing video games and distributing games made for the MS-DOS system.
The Adventures of Fatman is a point and click adventure for Microsoft Windows released in 2003.
Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, and for which no official support is available.
Proprietary software is software that, according to the free and open-source software community, grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting their freedoms.
Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) like access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies govern the use, modification and distribution of copyrighted works and of systems that enforce these policies within devices. DRM technologies include licensing agreements and encryption.
GOG.com is a digital distribution platform for video games and films. It is operated by GOG sp. z o.o., a wholly owned subsidiary of CD Projekt based in Warsaw, Poland. GOG.com delivers DRM-free video games through its digital platform for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux.
In the video game industry, digital distribution is the process of delivering video game content as digital information, without the exchange or purchase of new physical media such as ROM cartridges, magnetic storage, optical discs and flash memory cards. This process has existed since the early 1980s, but it was only with network advancements in bandwidth capabilities in the early 2000s that digital distribution became more prominent as a method of selling games. Currently, the process is dominated by online distribution over broadband Internet.
Video game preservation is a form of preservation applied to the video game industry that includes, but is not limited to, digital preservation. Such preservation efforts include archiving development source code and art assets, digital copies of video games, emulation of video game hardware, maintenance and preservation of specialized video game hardware such as arcade games and video game consoles, and digitization of print video game magazines and books prior to the Digital Revolution.
By day, 28-year-old Sarinee Achavanuntakul is an investment banker in Hong Kong, but by night, she runs the infamous Home of the Underdogs, a Web site she founded three and a half years ago, and receives an average of more than 30,000 unique visitors per day. According to Achavanuntakul, the purpose of starting Home of the Underdogs was simple: to preserve out-of-print games that publishers no longer support, to keep them from falling into oblivion, and to honor other underrated games, including freeware games and recent commercial titles that might have been poor sellers.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)