Abandonware games home of the underdogs
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"I think the best proof (of) how HOTU succeeds at this goal is the blooming community that has sprung up around it. HOTU "aims to be a museum of sorts, where people can find the games they used to play back in the old days and relive sweet memories," he says. Indeed, Achavanuntakul claims the site has 80,000 members.Īnd according to Farago, it is that substantial community of gamers that makes HOTU such a destination for him and many like him. Regardless, HOTU is thriving, despite a regular stream of cease-and-desist letters. "The game industry has seen numerous instances of older vintage games re-released in new formats, proving that older games continue to have commercial viability for many years," he wrote.
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Because of this, HOTU still offers games for download that may appear as belonging to publishers who don't wish their games to be available."īut Hirsch, in his statement to Wired News, argues that it doesn't matter who owns the rights to a game, because someone does. For example, it took me a month to convince EA that Dune 2000 was not the first Dune game. "I've contacted publishers numerous times about products they advertised as original, even though they were sequels. "It appears that the abandonware community knows better who holds the copyright to a particular game, so sometimes they may claim control over something they don't own," says Purdes, who used to run his own abandonware site. One problem, she and others say, is that game companies often don't know what games they own. Since abandonware makes no money for the publishers anymore, it's not their priority to stamp it out."īut Achavanuntakul says that whenever she is asked to take a game down by its rightful owner, she does so.
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"I think the site is able to stay alive," she says, because of a "willingness or at least a passive willingness of copyright holders – and the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) – to turn a blind eye. "There is absolutely no way in the world I can consider it to be legal, even if I want it to be."īut she argues that publishers often turn the other way when it comes to abandonware, focusing instead on outright piracy, or "warez." "Abandonware is certainly not legal," she says. "The copyrights in older games remain valid and enforceable regardless of whether they are found on store shelves or not, and copying or distributing those games is a copyright infringement." "Copyrights are not considered abandoned just because they are no longer commercially exploited or widely available," wrote Ric Hirsch, senior vice president for intellectual-property enforcement at the Entertainment Software Association, to Wired News in a statement. Of course, to the publishers of old games, even ones that are out of print, such a stand is illegal. "It's also important because there is now no Project Gutenberg equivalent for games, and games stand a much higher chance than printed materials of being lost without serious efforts." "It's important to keep abandonware alive because countless games will be lost without such efforts, since few companies nowadays even know what classic games they own," she says. Barring freakish luck, where else could you stumble into Italian developer (Alessandro) Ghignola's innovative Noctis, or examples of the Japanese freeware shoot'em-up scene?"Īnd Achavanuntakul says that, despite operating in the legally murky waters of the abandonware world, it's crucial to keep games that publishers no longer care about available for posterity. "In fact, I have come to partially see HOTU not so much as a game museum or an abandonware site, but as an information hub where all these unheard-of, small-scale projects can be found.
"I have come to realize that the shiniest gems you can get from HOTU are often the small, independent and therefore virtually unknown games," he says. Kalman Farago, a frequent HOTU visitor, concurs. "The best thing about doing this is definitely the happiness I feel when someone tells me they discovered a great game they have never heard of before, and never got a chance to buy when it was in print," says Sarinee Achavanuntakul, who operates HOTU.