Home of the Underdogs

Home of the Underdogs
	Home of The Underdogs as of 14 May 2006
Type of site	Abandonware video games
Owner	Sarinee Achavanuntakul
URL	http://www.the-underdogs.org (archived); Defunct; multiple revivals exist (see below)
Registration	Not required
Launched	September 1998/April 2009
Current status	Original website defunct; succeeded by multiple third-party mirrors/revivals
Content license	CC BY-NC-SA

Home of the Underdogs (often called HotU) is an abandonware archive^[2] founded by Sarinee Achavanuntakul,^[3] in October 1998.

Before shutting down the original version in 2009, the site provided reviews for over 5,300 games and offered downloads of software and manuals for a number of games that were no longer commercially available. This allowed it to be a valuable resource to players who lost the original discs or manuals. While a majority of games available on the site were for DOS or Microsoft Windows, the site also contained a section with games for other platforms. Where downloads for these games were provided, they were usually present in formats compatible with emulators. The site also had scans of several gamebook series, many of them complete. In addition to commercial titles, the site contained hundreds of freeware titles.^[4]

^ Cite error: The named reference license was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^ Simon Carless, Gaming Hacks New York: O'Reilly Media (2004): 2 - 3. "Sites such as Home of the Underdogs ... have major copyright issues but can provide valuable resources, for example, for people who've lost legitimate copies of the manuals."
^ Saltzman, Marc (2002). "Flashbacks For Free: The Skinny On Abandonware". gamespot.com. Archived from the original on 2005-12-14. Retrieved 2012-12-29. By day, 28-year-old Sarinee Achavanuntakul is an investment banker in Hong Kong, but by night, she runs the infamous Home of the Underdogs, a Web site she founded three and a half years ago, and receives an average of more than 30,000 unique visitors per day. According to Achavanuntakul, the purpose of starting Home of the Underdogs was simple: to preserve out-of-print games that publishers no longer support, to keep them from falling into oblivion, and to honor other underrated games, including freeware games and recent commercial titles that might have been poor sellers.
^ Freeware on www.the-underdogs.org (2003, archived)

[license-1] Cite error: The named reference license was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[2] Simon Carless, Gaming Hacks New York: O'Reilly Media (2004): 2 - 3. "Sites such as Home of the Underdogs ... have major copyright issues but can provide valuable resources, for example, for people who've lost legitimate copies of the manuals."

[3] Saltzman, Marc (2002). "Flashbacks For Free: The Skinny On Abandonware". gamespot.com. Archived from the original on 2005-12-14. Retrieved 2012-12-29. By day, 28-year-old Sarinee Achavanuntakul is an investment banker in Hong Kong, but by night, she runs the infamous Home of the Underdogs, a Web site she founded three and a half years ago, and receives an average of more than 30,000 unique visitors per day. According to Achavanuntakul, the purpose of starting Home of the Underdogs was simple: to preserve out-of-print games that publishers no longer support, to keep them from falling into oblivion, and to honor other underrated games, including freeware games and recent commercial titles that might have been poor sellers.

[4] Freeware on www.the-underdogs.org (2003, archived)

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