This went live last week, but I wanted to give it a chance to stabilize before linking. Home of the Underdogs is back. Kind of. It’s a revival, which plans to pick up where the last king of abandonware left off, and push forward with lots of new functionality (user reviews, additions, etc). Home of the Underdogs has been sadly missed since it went bankrupt in February. While existing well into a legal grey area, it was a singular historical resource which any lover of the medium really has to adore. Go bookmark it, eh?
Of course, there’s a little internet drama around it.
I’ll keep it short, because I’m not actively involved in any way and not technically qualified to judge the merits of the case. Basically, while a revival group was formed, it ended up in a direct schism between different people wanting to take different routes.
The one linked to takes the idea that the site should press forward and embrace-off-the-shelf coding to allow to do it as quickly as possible. Its’ the one which is mainly active. Homeoftheunderdogs.net conversely wants to be more faithful to the original, without re-creating its problems, and seems to think that technically speaking HOTUD is going to fall over if it tries to do what it does. And then there’s Hotu.pratyeka.org which – er – does other stuff too. It’s classic Internet politics. I suspect eventually it’ll shake down one way or the other, but until it does, there’s a pack of Underdogs running these internet streets.
Oh, go watch the Wikipedia page to pick over some of this. It’s very much a story in progress.
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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.
As well as code, we should be preserving artwork, design documents, merchandise, game boxes and instruction manuals. This is going to be hard enough but how do we preserve some of the huge events in games like the stuff that goes on in EVE online, virtual protests, etc. etc. Video? Well firstly that’s boring and also how do we store all that video. Interviews with the people who were umm “there”? Sure try and find them and then how are you going to store those interviews?
It’s the tangible and intangible gaming heritage that is being lost all the time. Which is very sad because you’d think we’d know better by now…..
Cunzy: the interview I linked to above covers all those topics.
Ginger Yellow: Nobody listens to technoooooo
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.
Cunzy11: Lies! Lies and slander! :P
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….