Home of the Underdogs Goes Under

First GameHippo and now Home of the Underdogs (the URL no longer works so don't even bother clicking), the old vanguards of free online downloadable games are dropping like flies! So what kind of site was HoTU? The site was founded in 1998 by Sarinee Achavanuntakul, who goes by the name Underdogs or Fringer on her own blog.

The site is a big collection of abandonware, games (mostly DOS and Windows games) that were no longer supported by their publishers and were no longer commercially available. HoTU offered these games (and their manuals) as free downloads. There were also reviews and rankings and other goodies. Of course sometimes the site found itself in the legally gray area thanks to its hosting of out-of-print games without the consent of their creators/owners, but no one seemed to mind for the most part.

Throughout HoTU's history, the site went down many times and went through a few domain changes due to its owner's forgetting to renew its domain, resulting in many "supposed" death of the site. While the site has always somehow managed to come back, updates stopped sometime around 2006, and the site stayed stale for the past three years. In April of 2009, however, the site went down for good this time due to "bankruptcy", looks like the economic crisis is affecting us all!

Basically, HoTU's host ran out of money and went bankrupt, and the poor HoTU went down with its host, what a shame. All is not lost, however, the good news is that a Home of the Underdogs Revival Project is currently underway, seeking to bring back HoTU as a community-driven site, good luck!

Normally here is where I usually talk about the history of the site, but since Wikipedia has a much better summary of HoTU's history than I can probably muster, I'll just quote it here, lazy me:

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. Achavanuntakul long resisted the commercialization of the site with ads and popups but eventually agreed to it after donations were unable to cover mounting bandwidth costs.

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.

In January 2006, addition of any new entries to the site ceased completely.

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 were no longer available and attempts to download a game returned an error message: "I'm sorry, but the file doesn't exist."

On February 13, 2009 Home of the Underdogs went offline. According to a message posted on Twitter by the site's owner, this was because of the webhost's bankruptcy.

On March 2, 2009, Achavanuntakul posted on her blog that there is a revival project for the new HotU site going on at Google Groups. Because Achavanuntakul, a Harvard-graduate Thai intellectual, is too busy with her real life works to head this new project, evidently seen in the lack of site update for the last 3 years, she has passed the torch on to Dan Pinchbeck of Advanced Games Research Group at University of Portsmouth. She will continue to work as one of the project's collaborators.

And now some quotes from Achavanuntakul on the final moments of the site:

[...] Now that HoTU is down permanently because our wonderful webhost (they *are* really wonderful; I’m not being facetious here) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S., I think it’s time to update everyone on the situation, and how we can all help to revive the site

[...]

The games: as appalling as it may seem, I don’t have all the files anymore. I can probably try to find most of them on my archive CDs that are scattered around the house, but I suspect that getting them again from the Internet might be easier ;) I have seen quite a few "HoTU games" torrents around the web.

The database content: I guess this was one major reason people came to HoTU. The good news is that ALL of the database content (game reviews, info, classifications etc.) is still intact (minus stats like download frequency, file size etc. that could be auto-generated again anyway) because I keep the info in one big Excel file – feel free to download the Excel master file here (14MB).

The web pages/organization: The site archive.org has archived some old versions of the site. But Mr.Creosote, a fellow "abandonware webmaster" has done one better by archiving site organization and so on – you can see his amazing efforts here: http://www.goodolddays.net/hotud/

And on the HoTU Revival Project:

I would like to also announce that I am leaving the huge (but hopefully not thankless) task of reviving HoTU in the competent hands of Dan Pinchbeck of Advanced Games Research Group at University of Portsmouth who just started a major game emulation/preservation project at his university. I will join the discussion on Google Group and help do whatever I can.

[...]

That said, I have a few basic wishes that I hope will be shared by the new caretaker(s):

1. The new HoTU should be a community-driven site that has Wiki-style content so that everyone can help update the games’ information, add their own reviews, etc.

2. Nobody should ever pay anything to download games (I had to use a lot of annoying banner advertising to cover bandwidth costs; I’m not sure how expensive/cheap webhosting is right now; it would be great if there could be fewer annoying pop-ups).

3. People should be able to add their own entries & files (subject to some editorial approval).

So there you have it folks, the end of an era, and the start of new, let us wish best of luck to both the new GameHippo as well as the new HoTU.

Finally, if you were too lazy to read through all that, here is a collection of relevant links for your clicking pleasure:

• Home of the Underdogs Revival Project Google Groups - Keep updated on the status of the Revival Project.
• HoTU Revival Site - The place where of the new site?
• Attic of the Underdogs - Cache of the old site, also try Internet Archive for maximum effect.

• Fringer - Achavanuntakul's personal blog.
• Home of the Underdogs Revival Project - Fringer's blog post on the demise of HoTU and its revival
• Why abandonware distribution does far more good than harm - An old post on the legality of HoTU, fun read.
• Excel Master File - A Excel file of HoTU's game database, basically.

• RIP HotU - News report of this momentous event.
• Home Of The Underdogs Goes Under - Even The Escapist is in on it.
• HoTU Alternatives - Not all is lost, really.

Finally, here is a look at the old site, the one on the left is from the .org days, while the one of the right is form the .info days.