

Ī new version of the website became available at since September 2009 and remains active as of January 2022. The site maintainers warned in February 2014 that financing for the servers was becoming difficult and they may need to take it offline. Despite difficulties with providing direct access to abandonware, the new maintainers tried to reproduce the site's databases and reviews for these early video games. At the same time, the site established a partnership with GOG.com, a digital storefront that offered digital rights management-free games, to promote and offer some of the classic games that Underdogs had through GOG.com. As the database of HOTU was released under a CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license in March 2009, a team had been able to rehost the website as by September 2009. In early 2009, Home of the Underdogs had difficulty maintaining funding for its hosting duties, which led to the website's shutdown. In January 2006, due to new responsibilities at work, Achavanuntakul had to step off running the site, allowing other admins to continue to maintain it. The IDSA saw the offering of abandonware as a copyright violation for those publishers they represented, and Achavanuntakul complied with their requests by removing links to the software offered to otherwise keep the site going. At about the same time, her site gained attention from the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), the former name of the current Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the video game industry's trade organization. By the time the site had gotten to around 400 titles, Xoom permanently deleted the site, but Achavanuntakul had many offers for help from users around the globe to provide a more permanent hosting solution. She relaunched early in 1999, now providing the files under a. Īround that time, her web hosting service Xoom took down the site without warning, given the issue of copyrights with abandonware. Initially, she had about 20 games offered but within a few months, had gained help from others to expand to about 80 games. She was surprised that other older, popular titles such as Infocom and Quantum Quality Productions were not available through these sites, and took it upon herself to launch "Home of the Underdogs" that October, a more permanent site for users to obtain abandonware. However, by 1998, MicroProse no longer was selling any copies of the title, forcing Achavanuntakul to seek out a copy through an abandonware webring, eventually coming across the title offered to be played through emulation. History Īchavanuntakul, a Thai journalist, had been in the United States at that time and wanted to play MicroProse's 1989 title Sword of the Samurai, as her copy had fallen apart.
