Cool Thing Of The Week: Home Of The Underdogs

Game sales are a fickle animal. Most games have a shelf life measured in weeks, with only the loudest and most-publicized receiving any sort of attention. The rest are simply overlooked. So what happens to these passed-over games? They die a painful death, fading into obscurity. Or so it was until an intrepid Thai woman with a passion for games created Home Of The Underdogs, the videogame archive that was so much more. HOtU was an archive, first and foremost, containing hundreds of older, obscure games. Better yet, unless the site received a complaint from a copyright holder, it offered a torrent download and a direct download for each. I found many great games on this site that I had never even heard of, and anyone interested in the history of this young art of ours should investigate it. My favorite part was that each game had a short entry, a miniature review or retrospective describing it. There was both a site and user ranking system. There was even a series called Top Dogs, that catalogued the cream of the crop. It was freakin' awesome. Unfortunately, the original owner and updater had issues securing a domain, and then issues with free time (real life? What's that?) and HOtU stopped being updated, and then died. Fortunately, an enterprising community member managed to restore it under new management. It's missing some of th old features, like rankings, and the games are no longer hosted on the site, but the listings and reviews are still intact. Check it out!