Rock, Paper, Shotgun

15/06/2009 at 12:12 Rinox says:

Good to have the underdogs (whichever of them) back. Any site that pays proper tribute to the forgotten classic Realms of the Haunting deserves respect.

15/06/2009 at 12:23 Dominic White says:

To clarify: HOTU didn’t go bankrupt. Their web-hosting company did, and managed to take most of the site with it as they imploded.

What amazes me is that, for the most part, HOTU was a project run by one woman in her spare time. Her love of classic gaming was the stuff of legend. Sadly, she doesn’t have the time or drive to continue as she used to, but the community look like they’re picking up the slack.

15/06/2009 at 12:51 Captain Planet says:

Hail the best site on the internet.

15/06/2009 at 12:53 pimorte says:

I don’t think I approve of RPS approving a piracy site.

15/06/2009 at 12:58 muzz says:

pimorte: They do provide abandonware downloads, I’ll give you that, but for games that are still being sold somewhere, they just link to that somewhere. It’s not really straight piracy in many people’s opinion.

15/06/2009 at 13:11 Dominic White says:

Yeah, a lot of the reason why HOTU was covered by a wide variety of legitimate news sites (Gamespot even did a pretty big article on them back in the day) was their policy of doing a thorough search of the internet for a game before putting it up for download. If there was any retailer, anywhere in the world that still sold the game (within reason – a small store in Australia that only ships to Oz would be exempt), then they’d link to that instead of offering a download.

And the moment copyright holders asked to have stuff removed, it was. The whole thing was *technically* illegal, but they went to massive lengths to ensure that they weren’t stepping on anyones toes.

Also, agreeing with Joq. Seeing the community splintered like this is really depressing. Someone offer Sarinee a big sack of cash-moneys to come back and at least oversee the initial rebuild, if not stay on long-term! Her organizational skills were pretty damn impressive.

I’m still blown away that the webhost would just collapse like that, losing most of their hosted sites in the process.

15/06/2009 at 13:19 Count Zero says:

I always found amazing things on Home of the Underdogs, and it’s great to see it continue in some shape or form. I loved the site years ago, and what I would usually do was hit up a random game then follow all the game and developer links, sometimes for hours. HoTU introduced me to stuff like Sanitarium, Bad Mojo, Ultima Worlds and even System Shock 2…
I was in the habit of browsing on a regular basis, but moved on once the site stopped being updated. Good to see it’s been picked up. The site dates from before wiki’s were popular, and was mostly the work of one person -an incredibly dedicated one, but I can only imagine what a larger wiki community can do with the HoTU archives.

15/06/2009 at 13:24 Bhazor says:

Isn’t this how a religious war starts?
“No I think it should be called this!”
“No I think we should classify the games like this!”
“Yea, we shall embrace the unofficial and the indie!”
“God hates anything post 1990!”

Reply to Jim: Well seeing as no one is left to actually give money to it really is more a service. In an ideal all the makers would still be together and flogging their wares on GoG. But this is the real world with it’s *fucking* publishers so Home of the underdogs was often the only place you could get them. As it happens HotUD was generally very careful to remove any games, or put Amazon links to, any games that were re-released.

15/06/2009 at 13:31 Clovis says:

@Dominic White: It is not *technically* legal; at least not under US copyright law (which is similar to most other countries’ law, or the Berne Convention or whatever). You simply cannot distribute copies of something without permission of the author. It doesn’t matter if the author doesn’t seem to care. The “grey” area here is just that there’s very little chance of someone suing the website over this stuff, especially if they respond to takedown notices. Jim’s wiki link above seems to support this.

There is a way to make it properly legal, although it seems silly. The owner of the site shouldn’t put any material on it themselves, like YouTube. Then you just have to respond to the takedown notices, like YouTube does. The users of the site would clearly be breaking copyright laws, but the site itself wouldn’t.

Of course, this is all just nonsense. I can see nothing ethically wrong with the site at all. In fact, most people agree that is is proving an important service.

15/06/2009 at 13:45 Robin says:

It’s good that HOTU is being rethought. It was the product of a time when piracy of old games was rampant, essentially a ROM site with pretensions of historical preservation tacked on as an afterthought (and as its implosion demonstrated, not backed up by adequate organisation).

Abandonware is not legally a grey area at all, Jim. The vast majority of games hosted by HOTU and its ilk had easily identifiable rights holders. The “Abandonware FAQ” (with its utterly preposterous, infantile claims about when they think copyrights should expire) shows the true colours of the people involved in these efforts in the early 1990s.

Hopefully going forwards there will be more effort put into encouraging game creators to keep their work available (perhaps through sites like GOG.com) rather than finding excuses to rip it off.

15/06/2009 at 13:47 Robin says:

(I mean late 1990s of course. Out of coffee error.)

15/06/2009 at 13:47 Jockie says:

To be fair to the original HOTU, when a game was requested to be removed by the copyright holder, they generally did it (iirc there were no lucasarts game downloads for instance). It also included links to stores where games could be bought whenever possible.

15/06/2009 at 13:52 pimorte says:

Well, Robin says what I’m thinking but with better words.
So just imagine I said it first.

15/06/2009 at 13:53 Gap Gen says:

Wikifact: Apparently the first reference to piracy as copyright infringement was made by Daniel Defoe in 1703 (before copyright was part of British law by some 7 years).

15/06/2009 at 13:58 Robin says:

To clarify, I don’t think HOTU was putting anyone’s livelihood at risk, and I’d prefer people were playing old games than not, but claiming that it was providing an important service of preservation or striking a blow against The Man is just self-righteous blather.

15/06/2009 at 14:15 Robin says:

KG: I’ve heard of cases of arcade games being genuinely lost (due to suicide chips, dilapidated hardware, etc.), but I’d be surprised if there were many cases of easily-copyable PC, computer and console games being lost. Would be interesting to find out.

Certainly someone should keep an archive (I seem to recall reading that some university was planning to, or maybe the Library of Congress?), but it should be done actually as an archive, with the level of organisation and documentation that entails.

15/06/2009 at 14:18 jalf says:

@pimorte: How is it piracy exactly? Unlike most other abandonware sites, this one had a strict policy of removing downloads if 1) the game is still sold anywhere, or 2) if the rights holders request it.

Which means that the only games you can download are the ones that either have no owners, or whose owners have no problem with it.

15/06/2009 at 14:26 pimorte says:

@jalf – I’d put it forward that that’s the “steal until you get caught” approach. Should it really be the rightsholder’s responsibility to hunt down and request takedowns off n ‘abandonware’ sites for as long as they hold the copyright?
It should be the responsibility of the site itself to get permission first.

I do think there should be some sort of archival institution for games etc, like the Internet Archive was doing for a while. Keep it as a time capsule for release when the game runs out of copyright.

15/06/2009 at 14:28 Dominic White says:

That Gamespot article I mentioned actually interviewed a bunch of game developers and asked their thoughts on HOTU. All of them basically agreed that it was a good thing, and a necessity as publishers are unwilling to let go of anything, even if there’s no possible way of it turning a profit.

They also interviewed a couple of publishers and anti-piracy agencies, and they were just furious, and were apparently drawing plans to bring the site down for good.

15/06/2009 at 14:56 Risingson says:

HOTU has been my pass to maturity. But I meant the HOTU forum. I miss the board a lot. Sometimes I see hotuers around here, but I miss you, guys.

15/06/2009 at 14:58 Kieron Gillen says:

Abandonware is the sort of issue which you can use in an old-skool D&D character test, I suspect. For generally commercially unavailable games there’s no actual harm as there’s no financial loss – it’s merely a question of whether you stick to the firm letter of the law. I’m leaning Chaotic Good.

Christ, y’know? Imagine what pop-criticism would be like if you could only get hold of Beatles or Stones records from the 60s. That’s videogames. We’re neutering our thought due to industry short-sightedness.

KG

15/06/2009 at 15:04 Rinox says:

I think the fact that the original HoTU site actually hosted content (and not a little, too) but never was the victim of a serious lawsuit by anyone says enough about how little most companies cared.

Yes, technically speaking they were doing some illegal things, but not for any personal profit (probably more of a loss counting [wo]man hours) and filling in a clear vacuum in the PC game world. Laws, even copyright laws, aren’t an absolute measure. They’re interpreted by judges on a case-by-case basis, taking into account context, circumstances and motivations of the parties involved. Just because something is illegal in the strict sense of the word doesn’t mean it is wrong, per se. I know, I know, it’s a slippery slope. But still.

15/06/2009 at 15:06 Risingson says:

And anyway, i’ve seen closing board topics because they began with “i borrowed this game from my brother” and that was considered copyright infringement…

15/06/2009 at 15:12 jalf says:

@Should it really be the rightsholder’s responsibility to hunt down and request takedowns off n ‘abandonware’ sites for as long as they hold the copyright?

Well, yes. That is their responsibility. You have to enforce your copyright to get it, well, enforced.

And as already pointed out, how do you get permission when no rights holders exist? The thing about most abandonware is that it has changed owners so many times, and been through so many merges and bankrupcies that no owner can be found. No one can display the full paper trail proving that they now own the IP.

So you’d rather sit and wait for divine intervention to solve this problem? Rather than be realistic and say “Ok, if no one can say they own this, why don’t we make it available here until further notice?”

I do think there should be some sort of archival institution for games etc, like the Internet Archive was doing for a while. Keep it as a time capsule for release when the game runs out of copyright.

I do think I should be given a million dollars. Since we don’t live in a perfect world, why not take what we can get? As long as no one is willing to fund such an archival project, the best we have is HOTU. And like I said, at least the site tries to respect copyright when possible. I fail to see the problem.

Of course, a bonus question is, on whose authority should this archival project work? How would it get legal access to all these games? The US government? Doesn’t solve the problem for European or Japanese games. Perhaps each country that has ever produced a game should start their own archival project?

If we have a site that tries to archive games, while respecting any takedown notices they get from rights holders, I’m happy. It might be piracy if you strictly follow the letter of the law, but it hurts no one, and benefits the industry. It is not an attempt to “play games for free” or rip off anyone. It is an attempt to preserve a bit of otherwise neglected history.

It might technically violate the letter of the law, but not the intent of it. The intent of these laws is to protect the rights holders. Not to make anything they produce disappear if the owner does.

15/06/2009 at 15:21 James G says:

@Gap Gen

Oh we definitely need a fully decent media archive, covering everything from books, to music, to films, television and computer games. The problem with the latter items on the list is that it is considerably more expensive to store them for long periods of time, although obviously that is something which is getting cheaper.

I find something seriously tragic in the loss and death of culture or knowledge. Though ultimately minor in the grand scheme of things, I found the lost episodes of television series such as Doctor Who to be sad, not to mention countless other texts which have died without anyone to remember them. languages die with no linguists to note them down, and with them is lost some of the key ways in which a culture records its own history. (Note: I’m not arguing in favour of static culture, The fact that something dies ‘in the wild’ so to speak, is not always a bad thing.)

15/06/2009 at 15:36 Saul says:

Laws shouldn’t be followed just because they exist. That way fascism lies. Do what’s right. Go RPS. Go HotU!

15/06/2009 at 15:57 Markoff Chaney says:

I absolutely feel it is imperative we maintain a record of media. I also feel it’s important we convert all analog media to a lossless digital format post haste to stop the degradation of most analog forms of storage which, by their nature, deteriorate unless they are hermetically sealed. I can copy 0s and 1s all day long, and, assuming hardware is good, 0s stay 0s and 1s stay 1s. Perfect replication is possible with Digital media, but not with analog media.

If it’s never saved at all, though, it’s gone forever, and that’s the crux of this argument. Is doing the right thing by history’s standards an acceptable reason to break copyright? As Tei said, how much source code is lost forever? At least, this way, some compiled binaries still remain. I would prefer a proper library (actually, multiples – you have to have a backup – look at the Library of Alexandria) with all proper code wheels, documentation, etc. However, in the absence of proper, I’ll take what I can get. Abandonware is, technically, a violation of copyright. The spirit of what it offers, however, is that of a collector. The spirit was also maintained in that they would endeavor to not put anything up if it could be sold.

I dream of a day when GOG, and competing services, has every title ever made throughout perpetuity and when I can re-purchase the first King’s Quest if I want (hopefully not on 5.25 inch floppies this time, though). I hope, one day, everything is available for me to purchase from the people that made it to help them make more games or just keep breathing one more day. Until then, I would rather the games be saved somewhere than nowhere, even if it’s legally grey.

15/06/2009 at 15:58 BigJonno says:

“Abandonware is pretty much a term invented to make people feel better about piracy from certain time periods.”

So abandonware is basically Johnny Depp?

15/06/2009 at 16:10 Robin says:

@Markoff Chaney:

If it’s never saved at all, though, it’s gone forever, and that’s the crux of this argument.

This still sounds far fetched, in the context of sites like HOTU. Are there any recorded cases of them tracking down the only extant copy of a game? Most things on there seem to be sourced from people’s attics.

15/06/2009 at 16:25 diebroken says:

@Robin: It could happen… http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/14/011230

15/06/2009 at 16:27 M.P. says:

Jeez, HOTU coming back is one of the most heartwarming news stories on the internet today (on the same day as this story: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/pets/news/pup-survives-being-flushed-down-toilet-1705556.html – coincidence? I THINK NOT!) and nevertheless its announcement has gotten derailed by the dancing antics of the piracy bugbear and its accordion-playing leash-holder.

Anyway, long may HOTU and all underdogs (and underwater dogs) continue!

15/06/2009 at 16:35 Sam says:

@Robin:
Out of interest: way back in this thread, you described the arguments about when copyright should expire in the Abandonware FAQ as “infantile”. I’ve looked at it just now, and I’m not sure how that adjective applies – what they seem to be saying is “copyright used to be shorter, but now it’s really long, we should make it shorter again”. It’s not so much an argument as a statement, admittedly, but it doesn’t exactly come across as infantile. (And, in any case, what they probably meant was that abandonware is within the spirit of the original copyright laws, which they like a lot more than the current ones.)
In any case, copyright exists to allow the producer to profit from selling copies of their IP, for a limited period, to encourage them to produce more stuff. I fail to see how you can describe HOTU as “ripping games off” in this context – copyright was never intended to prevent people from getting copies of IP that was no longer being made available (indeed, it is entirely within the spirit of copyright’s intent to allow this to happen, as it encourages the producer to make it available again (at which point copyright protects their right to make money off their work)).

15/06/2009 at 17:01 Edgar the Peaceful says:

15/06/2009 at 17:18 A-Scale says:

I’m rather confused here. I tried to use the site, but found it rather hard to navigate (for instance, the “date” button only organizes top to bottom, you can’t go from most recent to oldest), and on top of that all of the games I hoped to get from them were unavailable; I just had to go somewhere else to look for them. What exactly is the point of this site? I want to have a reason to rave about it, too.

15/06/2009 at 17:47 Dr Gonzo says:

There IS a library of games at Nottingham Trent Uni actually. Everyone should donate their old games and consoles they don’t want to them.

15/06/2009 at 18:00 Horza says:

As a sidenote about publishers making old games available nowadays: I hope they’d sell them at sensible prices. $10 for HOMM1 on gog.com, come on.

15/06/2009 at 18:24 Gremmi says:

It’s not really false. The reviews Sarinee wrote weren’t particularly good on average, serving as little more than box blurb with a couple of sentences of opinion. I also never said the reviews were plagiarised, as they were credited, just lifted entirely which was a bit lazy (though partially understandable given the amount of stuff there). English not being her native language doesn’t matter a whole deal, as she is perfectly fluent in it.

I’m not suggesting that the site was bad because of that, merely that it was the sheer size of it that should take most of the credit (but yes, admittedly the search and general navigation was extremely good for the time). A lot of reminiscing of the site when it went down seemed to think that it was the be-all and end-all of abandonware/retro gaming, but that was far from the case.

The site died (before the website itself expired) simply because it wasn’t open enough. Those few who had database access could only make minor changes here and there, and anyone who actually held the keys to the entire thing seemed either reluctant or didn’t care enough to give them to anyone else. The original plan pre-site death was to redesign the site into a wiki-like, where anyone could add in information about the game – though like most promises in the last days, never officially materialised. A couple of unofficial attempts were made, but never really got anywhere due to most of the community clinging to the notion that the site itself was still alive.

I’m probably just bitter because the movie spin-off site she asked me to run for her never materialised, but still.

15/06/2009 at 18:28 Gremmi says:

‘ello Frosty.

Cor, it’s like a reunion party in here. Now all we need is Reverendo and Pouzzler to turn up.

15/06/2009 at 19:40 lumpi says:

Great news. HotU has always beens such a lovely site for classic game enthusiasts.

The whole politics part turns me off, though. What is that all about?

15/06/2009 at 19:57 Sam says:

@Robin: Yeah, that is a lot closer to infantile, I admit. Ah well, at least he’s either calmed down a little or been replaced by someone more sane since.

15/06/2009 at 21:36 Chis says:

@Rinox:
“Realms of the Haunting”

Top man! What a choice! I was lucky to pick up the original unboxed (but in the quad-jewel case at least) for a fiver off eBay. A fabulous, inspired experience, and I will treasure it always.

…. and remembering RotH is precisely the sort of thing HOTU is valuable for! Glad to see it’s back in… so many forms. :P

15/06/2009 at 22:22 mysterylobster says:

The first site really needs to be sortable by subgenres. That was one of the handier features of the original HOTU site.

15/06/2009 at 23:10 Chis says:

As an aside, I happen to own one of the games on HOTU’s wishlist: Cyberwar.

It’s 3 discs of pre-rendered quick-time events, set to FARKING ORESUM (thanks Yahtzee) space trance music by System 7 when they were still good (1993, heady days).

The reason it never made it to HOTU, torrents or anywhere else, is that… it’s 3 discs of pre-rendered quick-time events. Just download the soundtrack (really, go find it now) and go watch The Lawnmower Man again.

16/06/2009 at 00:00 Harry Callahan says:

Well, then the law is crazy!

16/06/2009 at 02:50 Wooly says:

“Harry Callahan says:

Well, then the law is crazy!”

That’s very *dirty* of you! ;)

16/06/2009 at 10:29 Ginger Yellow says:

. Are there any recorded cases of them tracking down the only extant copy of a game? Most things on there seem to be sourced from people’s attics.

I’m not sure why these two are mutually exclusive, although I doubt there were any literal last extant copies on HotU. I mean, plenty of “only known version” of works of art/literature have been found in boxes in people’s attics.

16/06/2009 at 11:26 Rinox says:

@ Chis

Nice to see someone else who loves ROTH so much! I vividly remember picking up the director’s cut edition in, of all places, my local supermarket. I still own and cherish the huge box with the cool front cover. I miss those days, before they went to the smaller boxes and then just DVD cases.

The atmosphere of ROTH was unparallelled. The way the developers filled it with references to occultism, religion, history and mythology screamed dedication. The letters of Florentine to R.J.! Aelf! The Tower and the audio fragments ‘lost in time’ you would hear when passing through it! The hand-drawn maps! The puzzles in Arqua! Belial! There’s just too much to be nostalgic about. :-)

It appears someone took it up him or herself to preserve the game for the ages btw:

http://www.realmsofthehaunting.com/
Sorry… forgot to say great post – can’t wait to read your next one!

16/06/2009 at 14:50 Ginger Yellow says:

Cunzy: the interview I linked to above covers all those topics.

16/06/2009 at 19:30 sinister agent says:

The problems of keeping archives like these have barely been investigated. Despite common misconceptions museums and libraries are struggling to look after material culture. The science of preservation is still largely in it’s infancy and how we preserve the kind of stuff talked about here is a huge task.

Cunzy is right. I work as an archivist, and we do struggle – my employers need another two of me to really get any of our long-term projects off the ground, and half my department is retiring next year. And we’re a pretty major organisation, not just some obscure rural county record office.

The sheer effort involved in identifying and cataloguing everything, including finding the expertise needed to do so, is enormous even for simple pieces of paper in (mainly) English. Multiply that by the necessary knowledge and time to find the hardware/emulation for all these games, and then again by the resources it’d take to accomodate all the different hardware formats and iterations of operating systems, and you’re looking at a budget that would dwarf pretty much any existing archiving project.

HOTU is a brilliant site not just for the purpose of archiving games and information about them (including how they were received, who worked on them, etc.), but potentially for showing the difficulties the industy faces and why they’re significant. It’s not just about preserving dusty old legal documents of no interest to 99% of the population, but about showing future generations – even people just 20 or 30 years away – what life is like now. Not just the international events everyone will read about that don’t really affect us all that much on a day-to-day basis, but the ordinary things that normal, real people do and where the things those future people have came from.

Of all industries, the games industry is surely the most fragile in terms of record-keeping. Just imagine if there’d been a truly concerted effort to archive and maintain all the earliest movies and photographs made. Film students and filmmakers today would be creaming their pants. The games industry, judging by its enormous growth and its overlaps with the computer and film industries, is likely to be even more influential and more interesting to future students and historians.

07/08/2009 at 08:41 nicolas says:

I hope the keep the sites going…It is sad how not more people help sites like this and just accuse them…

If it wasn’t for home of the underdogs as well as 3d shooterlegends/adventurelegends i would never have known many very old and truly special games…

There are really good games even nowdays that almost nobody knows so imagine the older days before the internet how many great games came and left without most people even realising there were such games….