{"id":1176,"date":"2009-02-13T11:23:51","date_gmt":"2009-02-13T15:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/02\/13\/rip-hotu\/"},"modified":"2009-06-07T10:27:46","modified_gmt":"2009-06-07T15:27:46","slug":"rip-hotu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/02\/13\/rip-hotu\/","title":{"rendered":"RIP HotU"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>EDIT:<\/strong> Since this post still gets a lot of traffic, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hotud.org\/\">I thought I should direct people to the new HOTU<\/a>. May they prosper.<\/p>\n<p>All the notice we had was a February 9 Twitter from the proprietor.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Home of the Underdogs webhost went bankrupt T_T.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>And with that sad note from Sarinee Achavanuntakul, one of the most enduring (if illegal) tributes to gaming history came to an end.<\/p>\n<p>The site attracted a global community and, for a while, had a very active and knowledgeable forum. I used to spend a lot of time there. <a href=\"http:\/\/abandonia.com\">Other so-called &#8220;abandonware&#8221; sites are out there<\/a>, so nothing has really been lost in a material sense, unless you include the site&#8217;s thorough cataloging by theme, publisher, genre, sub-genre, etc. For a while, HotU was a key part of my professional development, letting me fill in the gaps of my gaming history.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, the site hadn&#8217;t been updated in years. Achavanuntakul decided to put her Harvard degree to good use in championing <a href=\"http:\/\/fringer.org\">noble causes in her native Thailand<\/a>. Sustainable development, fair markets, small business, that sort of thing. So her long labor of love fell into disrepair, though the files were all there. Given her new interests, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s likely there will be any revival of HotU from Achavanuntakul.<\/p>\n<p>So drink a toast to one of the finest intros to great, good and crappy games of the past. It was nice while it lasted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>EDIT: Since this post still gets a lot of traffic, I thought I should direct people to the new HOTU. May they prosper. All the notice we had was a February 9 Twitter from the proprietor. &#8220;Home of the Underdogs webhost went bankrupt T_T.&#8221; And with that sad note from Sarinee Achavanuntakul, one of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-iY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1528,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176\/revisions\/1528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}