Oh man, HOTU is down!

Did anybody but me ever visit Home of the Underdogs? It was an Abandonware site - where you could download old, long out of print computer games.

Amazingly, it tried really hard to be legal - or at least as legal as possible. Games that were for sale *somewhere* on the 'net couldn't be downloaded, and takedown notices from copyright owners were always responded to promptly. So, after being around for ten years or so, anything on the site was there thanks to the implicit permission of the owners.

In addition to just being a tremendous resource for old games, it had a wealth of other stuff - reviews, manuals, and the admin tried really hard to hightail games that no one played at the time - the Underdogs of the title.

So, it turns out that the site has gone down. A little digging reveals that this is because the web host has gone bankrupt, and taken their servers with them. And here's the gutpunch - the archive is now gone, having not been backed up anywhere.

There's a revival group operating out of google groups, which looks like it's going about as well as you'd expect - so not very well at all. The founder and admin of the site Sarinee "Fringer" Achavanuntakul has released what she still has into the wild under a CC license - so the database and the webpages are mostly still intact. Although, seeing as how the database turned out to be a 15meg Excel spreadsheet, that may not be as helpful as it sounds.

Still, I've got hopes that someone will put this thing back together. The site really wasn't all that complex by modern web 2.0 standards - the hardest part will be to get the thousands of games back. Still, bittorrent must be good for something besides linux distros and Doctor Who, right?

Someone who has more free time then sense should really spend a weekend and rebuilt it.