Home of the Underdogs

Infobox Website
name = Home of the Underdogs
favicon = Home of the Underdogs favicon.png


caption = Home of The Underdogs as of 14 May 2006
url = http://www.the-underdogs.info/
type = Abandonware video games
registration = Not Required
owner = Sarinee Achavanuntakul
author = Sarinee Achavanuntakul
launch date = September 1998
current status = Hiatus

Home of the Underdogs (often called HotU) is an abandonware archive [Simon Carless, "Gaming Hacks" New York: O'Reilly (2004): 2 - 3. "Sites such as Home of the Underdogs ... have major copyright issues but can provide valuable resources, for example, for people who've lost legitimate copies of the manuals."] founded by Sarinee Achavanuntakul in September 1998, and has grown to be one of the most significant abandonware websites on the Internet.

Content

The site provides reviews for over 5,300 games, as well as offering downloads of software and manuals for a number of those games that are no longer commercially available - this allows it to be a valuable resource to players of the original games who have lost the original discs or manuals. While the majority of games available on the site are for DOS or Microsoft Windows, the site also contains a section with games for other platforms. Where downloads for these games are provided, these are usually present in formats that are compatible with emulators. The site also has scans of several gamebook series, many of them complete. In addition to commercial titles, the site contains a small number of 'freeware' titles. The freeware games dominate the recent years of the site's game directory, particularly 2000-2005, where any unauthorized release of a commercial game title made during this period would be liable to cause a civil suit.

However, it should be noted that downloading is strictly moderated. Users may not download more than one file at a time or will be banned anywhere from three hours up to one week. This includes speeding downloads using tools such as Getright. One common complaint users share towards the site regards download speeds. A 768KB connection, for instance, will typically download a 2 megabyte file in about 10 minutes (download speeds have been known to go as slow as 10 kbit/s on a high-speed connection). This did not stop the site from expanding, however.

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 games perceived by some as gems, but that for some reason failed commercially, for instance because of poor marketing.
* "Hall of Belated Fame" refers to a small number of games that should have received a number of awards and high ratings in the opinion of the site's staff. All of its members are also considered "Top Dogs" by definition.
* "Real Dog" refers to games that failed for a good reason, usually poor gameplay, but that were requested to be included on the site by fans, or fans of related games.

The site claims to be more of a museum than a download site, offering what are by them considered "great" games that never received due attention upon their initial releases. It is also asserted that the site is careful about copyright concerns, so 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 for example with a link to the site selling the game, if applicable. The site has also removed a number of ESA/IDSA members' titles from its download archive.

The site also has a store in which independent games are sold, and maintains an active member community by means of its forum and IRC channel.

History

While at first hosted on free web hosts, Home of the Underdogs began using a dedicated server due to its high bandwidth usage in February 2000. The original domain name was "theunderdogs.org"; in 2002 it was changed to "the-underdogs.org" and in 2006 to "www.the-underdogs.info". The reason in both cases was that the domain was not renewed in time and was subsequently taken over by cybersquatters.

After a brief stint of being offline during the month of September 2008, HOTU seemingly returned late in the month, however, the games once offered are no longer available and attempts to download a game return an error message: "I'm sorry, but the file doesn't exist."

References

External links

* [http://www.the-underdogs.info Home of the Underdogs]
* [http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2004/04/62975 Wired News article on HotU]
* [http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/abandonware/ GameSpot article on abandonware featuring interview with HotU]
* [http://www.abandonwarering.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1697#p2707 HOTU returns, thanks to a subdomain webmaster of HOTU]