But to be completely honest, the amount of people who put their money where their mouth was and helped her support the site financially, was just not enough to keep the whole thing afloat. Her legacy was saluted by all the fans of those old games. The toll that running the website, combined with the constant fighting with publishers who did not want abandonware to exist in the first place, in case they decided to resell their old games, proved too much for the owner and sole developer of the site : Achavanuntakul. But, one day, HotU, which was by far the biggest site, the largest archive, and the most professionally run site of them all, finally shut down. Many sites who had crossed the line got shut down, only to reopen on a different address and get shut down again. Since the late 90s, abandonware has changed a lot, it pushed the limits of piracy and received severe pushback by publishers who were still around. Every game had its own detailed description and the whole site was used not only for preservation, but for the celebration of gaming’s history. Home of the Underdogs ( HotU) was not only a platform to download the games (and software), it was pretty much a museum of yesteryear’s gaming. It was a community of volunteers who would share their old copies and Home of the Underdogs was THE waterhole where we would all gather. We were thousands of nostalgic gamers wanting to reconnect with the games of our past, and the games we had missed the first time around.
Well, there was a rapidly growing community of people who definitely cared. So, how was one supposed to play Master of Magic anymore? Most people would probably shrug and say “ you just don’t, who cares”. Digital distribution was not even a concept, Steam didn’t exist. At the time, GOG.com did not exist of course. The games were made available for free, but they were also not available for purchase.
So, that’s not legal then, is it? Well, it was definitely one of those grey area that the internet is so good at uncovering and exploiting. The term was coined online and meant to describe games that were no longer distributed, whose publisher had disappeared or that were old enough that no one apart from their original fans even remembered them. The site offered free downloads of old PC games. In the late 90s, when internet became ubiquitous in our homes, I discovered a little abandonware website called Home of the Underdogs.
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