Legally grey abandonware site Home of The Underdogs disappeared off to whatever under it is dogs come from a little while back, after the site’s hosts ran out of money. While we could all argue about the rights and wrongs of hosting out-of-print games without the blessing of their creators/owners until the undercows come home, it’s hard to deny it was a temptingly useful way to play the PC games of yesteryear. Even when did you already own dusty floppy copies of ‘em.
With it gone, tracking down specific retro PC games has become a whole lot harder, and that’s no doubt happy news as far as some are concerned. Seems the Underdogs might yet find a new home, however.
Former HOTU boss Sarinee popped up a post recently revealing that there are revival plans for the site – somewhat complicated by the fact she no longer has copies of all the games she used to host. So, to get the place up and running again would involve, as well as jumping through hosting and law-dodging hoops, someone aggregating all the former content. That’d be these guys, then.
So, er, should we be well-wishing the project? Well personally I think – oh, look over there, it’s a bee!
What, me? No, I wasn’t saying anything. Anyway, let’s hope Steam and GoG.com amass enormous retro catalogues as soon as possible. Then we won’t need an Underdogs, right?
Thanks to Jay for the tip.
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I think the underdogs is pretty safe legally, and don’t think it’s a problem to promote the site. It’s not like the site promoted piracy in any way. Whenever the rights holder to a game contacted the site, they removed the download links, and when possible, redirected people to stores where they could buy the games legally. So the only games you could download were the “real” abandonware, that is, the games where the publisher or whoever owns the rights hadn’t even bothered to say ‘no’. Is that piracy? Perhaps legally, but quite clearly, no one had any interest in stopping it.
Eh? You’re saying that writers would only write works of fiction if they were guaranteed to hold the rights exclusively for umpteen years? I think you’re underestimating the little word “creative” here. Most “creative work” is done because people want to. Not because they think it’s going to make them rich. Not saying all IP protection laws should be cancelled, but your reasoning seems flawed.
Some games do. The ones where the rights holder can’t even be identified. Where no one can even prove that they own the rights to the game, or where the rights holder have gone out of business ages ago. Why shouldn’t those become available in the public domain?
You could also argue that the ones where the publisher has no intention of ever selling the game again, nor create new games based on the same IP, would be pretty worthless commercially too. But of course the legal situation there is a lot trickier
tssk says:
I’ve said this at many places but it bears repeeating here. I can go into any bookstore and buy Shakespeare. Any record store and buy old Bing Crosby cd’s
But many many books have been lost to obscurity over the years. Shakespeare and Bing Crosby are available because they are really good (at least in a lot of people’s opinions) but only a fraction of the world’s creative IP is available. I hope that the likes of GoG preserve and sell the classic games, ones that deserve to be heard of in 500 years time but its not reasonable for GoG to be a museum too.
HOTU was important because it was that museum and, even if it no longer distributes games, it would be awesome to have it’s reviews back and for someone somewhere to have copies of the games that will, one day, be legally out of copyright.
What Helm said. HotU’s importance had as much to with its organisation of content and other value-adds, than it did with the ‘free games, yay!’ service. There’s no other place out there that passionately captures computer gaming history as well as HotU did. Free games were a bonus.
Things like Starcraft maybe not since thats still being played in Korea, but System Shock 2 should be abandonware, again I can’t find that anywhere to buy that. So yeah it shouldn’t be a blanket all games that are 10 years old are abandonware. You should look at whether the company still exists, whether its an IP still being used and whether you can get it in the shops.
Then it becomes Abandonware.
“The ones where the rights holder can’t even be identified. Where no one can even prove that they own the rights to the game, or where the rights holder have gone out of business ages ago. Why shouldn’t those become available in the public domain?”
Sure. But the number of games that fit any of those categories is vanishingly small.
…
If HOTU was ever genuinely about preservation, they would have, you know, preserved their archive for eventualities such as this.
@Robin:
It has been archived by Sarinee, but not recently. Other people will have large amounts of the info also. Hosting and compiling this will be a challenge, but I would hope that it will be completed.
HOTU was the best. I will miss it.
I had no idea there was a HotU still around to go down. As far as I was aware it went down years ago.
But it’s incredibly sad that the archive has died. I spent many hours surfing there and learnt many a thing; it turned me into the gamer I am today.
And as for abandonware, why not offer for free download titles that aren’t available any more? Nobody’s losing out and a bunch of people can play some gems (or fails for design purposes).
The trouble with unabandonment of games (not that I’m disputing copyright exactly) is that games do have a life span. No one… no wait, No Publisher/Distributor of games should be allowed to sell stuff that is so old it doesn’t work on the grounds that “Well the community of enthusiasts will fix it up”. That part stinks. You could argue it’ll just mean catalogues get culled from GoG or whatever, but it’s a problem is all I’m saying, one not shared by books and music.
Anyway, I concur with Domenic White and others that HotU wasn’t just abandonware. It was a better allusic guide/IMDB of games than most other things going. Mobygames ain’t there yet.
Most of this discussion is pointless. Maybe games should become abandonware. But they do not, and they never will without a massive shift in the public’s knowledge and interest in copyright. I really can’t ever see that happening. Most people (ie, not tech savvy gamers) would quickly (and erroneously) decide that this is stealing (as opposed to copyright infringement). The huge majority of people will not demand changes to copyright law. They’ve been convinced that it is “property”, and will defend the “property” owner’s “rights”.
Without a huge shift, there is no talk of the “legality” of abandonware. It is clearly illegal. I hope HOTU can come back, but they will always have problems. A real company (with real assets) could never do what they do. Any one of the rights holders to so-called abandonware could sue them for tremendous amounts of money. They do not get DMCA style protection (like youtube) because they are knowingly hosting and distributing copyrighted works. There is NO rule in copyright law that you can do what you want with something until someone complains. Maybe there should be, but there is not.
Feel free to complain to your local democratically elected representatives…
The main part of HotU that’s worth saving is the commentary and metadata. As for the games themselves, that’s a problem that the preservation folks have been wrangling with for years. Companies still hold the rights to those old games, but in some cases, the content itself is all but lost. It gets even worse when you consider that floppy disks won’t last forever, and nobody know for sure how long CDs last, so even legal copies may be in danger of disappearing.
GoG is great since it means that old games get renewed attention. However, it’s really the less popular stuff that’s at greatest risk of disappearing, not to mention games for obsolete platforms.
I often went there with the intent to download, but wound up reading their articles instead. Sharing memories proved to be more satisfying than actually trying to get Wing Commander to run.
GoG is fine, but it’s a business, with business interests. What we/I want is a public archive for games, similar to the Internet Archive (archive.org).
Here’s what the ‘about’ page would look like (based on the Internet Archive’s *actual* about page):
“The [Gaming] Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build a [gaming] library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 2009 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from [the public and publishers]. In late [2010], the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the [Gaming] Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and [related] software as well as [manuals and marketing material] in our collections.”
I’d love to read that on a website one day.
Here are a few resources that might help in this discussion:
http://www.thepublicdomain.org/download/
http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf
These books discus the place of copyright, where it came from and where its possibly going, and also how skewed the current copyright system is. I found them very interesting to read.
Clovis, I would suggest that you do not state that a part of a conversation people are actively participating in is meaningless. I understand your point about the impracticality of a lot of the approaches/wishful thinking exhibited here but active, critical communication such as this is never meaningless.
The pirate bay trial results will tell us a lot about what the future of digital information distribution soon. The actual games will not be lost as long as people share information online anyway. The legality of the whole process will slowly but surely shift towards representing reality, not what knee-jerk lobby groups want. What’s important in the case of HoTU (or any site like it) is that if it is officially embraced as a valid historical archive and the stigma of ‘WOO PIRACY!’ is washed away then it will grow and flourish in ways that for anyone that has a love for videogames, will be amazingly practical.
Want to check out the rpg tactical combat system of Magic Candle 3? (it’s quite good) to get inspiration for your modern rpg? Just click here and the game will load right in your browser (optimally) in some dosboxian plugin. Want to compare modern adventure games with say, a Tex Murphy game of yesteryear? Just click here (things haven’t changed much!). So on. This will help raise awareness of the history of the medium and also clue people in on what actually makes an enduringly great game. This is only a good thing for all involved. Well, perhaps all but the huge companies that actually don’t want people to codify what exactly a great game is about and have the common standards raised, but let’s not shed any tears for them.
Abandonia? I know it doesn’t have nearly as many games, but it seems like the #1 ‘go to’ site for abandonware these days, even with nice reviews for each game.
Oh, and it was actually updated since 2006 too, another thing going for it. :)
HOTU was never really an “abandonware” site. It had some, of course. Perhaps more than most such sites. But it was really about shining a light into the dustier corners of the gaming scene, picking out games that for whatever reason didn’t get everyone’s attention right out of the gate, ranging right up to the present. It could still perform this function if it had no download links at all, provided that the games in question were available one way or another. GoG is unlikely to ever perform that function, because that’s not the point. The point there is to sell you older games nicely packaged for inexpensive prices.
As to the whole game rights issue – I’ve always favored a simple solution: you can’t just sit on a creative work. You have to be making it available for purchase and/or use to hang on to it. I have no issue with companies and creators wanting to hang on to the rights to the work they’ve done and poured money into, as long as I can still access that work through regular channels. There are way too many games that I can’t do that with. System Shock 2 being a notable example. And I don’t see any benefit to the public in the rights remaining with the current holder in a situation like that.
As for the ‘copyright solution’, how about infinite copyright… at a price that doubles every year. The first year is free, the second is $1, the third is $2, etc. 20 years is half a million bucks. 21 years is more than a million. Discuss.
I didn’t know HotU had died, and I am saddened immensely. As so many others have said, not just for the shady downloads available (because they were a pig to get going), but just for the nostalgia that a brief review, a few screenshots and the downloaded MIDI theme would fire up in me. Tears often welled alongside those electronic symphonies, a forgotten ode to a halcyon childhood hunched in the bedroom.
I might cry now, actually.
This actually demonstrates very well a major irony of our times. There’s a common conception that we’ll have more information about this era than we’ll know what to do with given the rates of literacy and communication technology, but whether that’ll actually prove to be true about the next 20 or 50 years is seriously questionable. Digital storage is fantastic and can be produced and stored at a ridiculously greater rate than manuscripts, but a piece of paper in a box that was locked in 1350 will still be in readable condition a thousand years later, and can be read and translated by anyone with eyes and enough patience to decipher and learn the necessary language. A server with thirty years worth of company reports and correspondence might be rendered useless in ten years, given a big enough advance in storage technology. If industry standards change and it’s too expensive to rejig the old archives, we could lose uncountable billions of files and documents.
Video games are arguably the most trivial potential loss, much as we love them, but it’s possible too that their popularity might lead to the development of systems and processes that effectively archive and update even the most obscure and awkward programmes and games. And that effort could conceivably be modified to preserve our wider history and thus SAVE CIVILISATION ITSELF.
At least, that’s what I say to my boss when she catches me playing Darklands in the office.
Actually, I read the EU was funding something of that sort.
So, if that works, great.
@Helm: Ya, I didn’t intend to demean the discussion. I was just inaccurately describing my own hopelessness about he topic. It doesn’t really matter if the Pirate Bay wins or not; I don’t live in Sweden. The internet will prevail either way. I can’t ever imagine seeing a “locked down” internet. OTOH, I also can’t ever imagine seeing sensible copyright laws being created. So, we’ll continue to do whatever we want, but most of it is illegal, so there is this tiny chance that the MAFIAA will decide to come and extort money from you. Ahh… so depressing….
@pepper: great links!
I shall raise a glass to HotU tonight, it is a sad day for the internets, long-loved site that it was.
The end of Underdogs is terrible, i serching on the net about 50hours for old submarine PC game S.T.O.R.M and i found only one site where i can download this game for free(this is extra rare game). I have downloadet it, but many extra rare games is in this time not exist on the net…it is ubelieveble, but it is true. Games like S.T.O.R.M or Animal is for all people on the world forever lost, becouse the HotU is death. R.I.P HotU… and than you…
(sorry for my english :-D )