Home of the Underdogs
 | |
Type of site | Abandonware Video Games |
|---|---|
| Owner | Sarinee Achavanuntakul |
| Created by | Sarinee Achavanuntakul |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Not Required |
Home of the Underdogs (HOTU) was founded by Sarinee Achavanuntakul in September 1998, and has grown to be one of the largest abandonware sites on the Internet. At first it was hosted on free homepage providers like Tripod, but later moved onto its own server.
It offers reviews for over 5,300 video games, as well as providing downloads and manuals for many games that are no longer available for purchase. Most games available on the site are for the PC (DOS and Microsoft Windows), but the site also contains a section with games for other platforms; these latter games are usually in formats that are compatible with emulators. The site also has scans of 33 gamebook series, many of them complete.
The site tends to focus on "underdog" games; that is, games that were not a huge commercial success for whatever reason. Some games are classified with one or more of three distinctions:
- Top Dog refers to the real gems that somehow failed, for instance because of poor marketing.
- Hall of Belated Fame (HOBF) refers to a very small number of games that should have received a large number of awards and high ratings in the opinion of the site's staff. All HOBF members are also considered Top Dogs by definition.
- Real Dog refers to those games that failed for a good reason, usually poor gameplay, but that were requested to be included on the site by some fans, or fans of related games.
The site claims to be more of a museum than a download site, offering what are now argued to be "great" games that never received due attention upon their initial releases (the "underdogs" referred to in the name). The site is careful about copyright concerns: if a game available for download becomes once more available for purchase, or if a game's copyright holder so requests, the downloadable files are removed, replacing them with a link to the site selling the game if applicable.
The site now has a store in which independent games (typically Shareware) are sold promoting and bringing new meaning to the spirit of the Scratchware Manifesto.
The site has a member community with which it communicates through an Internet forum and an IRC channel. The site also hosts the Reality on the Norm website.
In the future this website will be based on a wiki engine; Sarinee is currently looking for help with modifying Wiki codebases.
Website technical difficulties
The site has had a variety of domain names over the years[1], including www.theunderdogs.org, which was lost to a cybersquatter in March 2002.
On March 21, 2006, the http://www.the-underdogs.org/ website became inaccessible due to problems with the domain name. Sarinee Achavanuntakul, during an appearance on the site's IRC channel, related that problems with a credit card were hampering her efforts to reclaim the domain name. In the meantime, this domain was taken over by a search engine/potential cybersquatter. Achavanuntakul registered a new domain name, http://www.the-underdogs.info/, and moved the site there. After various difficulties, including users being required to edit their Windows system 'Hosts' file to access the site, the new address is fully functional as of July 26, 2006, but there has been no update since January 13, 2006. Negotiations over the .org domain are still underway.