Dismaler: I do not condone piracy or advocating copy right infringement.


What the hell happened!? I hope it's okay for me to talk about this on GOG's forums, but anyway. A private tracker by the name of Under Ground gamer has been taken offline.

There are a number of reasons why this bothers me so much. I suspect many of you hardcore retro gamers know of it but for those of you that don't Under Ground gamer was a torrent tracking site dedicated to the preservation of older games weather it be PC or console.

Torrent sites are often used for piracy this is true, but many of the games hosted on UG had their CD check DRM intact which admittedly was annoying, but the sited maintained that they were for preservation and not piracy.

UG had a massive selection of games many of which you couldn't find annoyware else. Before GOG got the rights to anvil of dawn these guys were the only ones I know of to have a working CD version of the game.

They did have some GOG games but you had to use a separate filter and it was frond upon to to torrent it. (as it should be lol)

It really disturbs me that this site was taken down for what seems to be copy right infringement. So many games on that site can't be found anywhere else. They really did preserve a great libry of games that no one may never again be able to play.

I know 2 abandonware sites that had it(and still do, for that matter). Don't be so alarmed, there's a gazilion places where you can get older games that you can't find anywhere else :P

Never heard of them, what makes them different than for example Pirate Bay?

It was private, and more like Abandonia or other abandonware sites just in torrent tracker form. I'm not ashamed to say that I was a big fan of theirs before I discovered GOG.

I guess its Six Feet Underground Gamer now.

I'll stop the bad jokes, don't hurt me.

I didn't have an account there, but was curious and searched for some info. Apparently a copyright watchdog group got them for having old games from publishers like EA. Not going to link it though as to not take a chance of breaking any rules.

Aaaaah that was the name!
After a re-install about a year ago where I forgot to back-up my bookmarks I couldn't remember the name of that site.
It's gone?
That's too bad, a lot of my sources for interesting stuff have disappeared in the past couple of years.

Oh god, the pirate bay is a jock. Seriously it's just there to troll lawyers

To say that the loss of a resource such as Underground Gamer was a great casualty to the gaming world would be an understatement. Sadly, this sort of thing has been happening far too often lately. They will be sorely missed.

I was registered to that site and I have to say it is really sad that the site went down. There were so many games you could get on there that you can't find anywhere else, especially when it came to getting MAME roms that actually worked. Heck, if it wasn't for that site I wouldn't have been introduced to the awesome South Korean DOS beat-em-up Eojjeonji Joheun Il-i Saenggil Geot Gateun Jeonyeok.

Thankfully though it seems like Underground Gamer is not completely dead according to the IRC they are hosting so there is hope that it will come back someday.

They where shot down by copyright trolls, it seems. I hope they'll come back sooner than later, because I still have my full Twilight downloads to complete. And to whomever did this: I hope you die in pain, in a great pain - to your balls/ovaries. UG wasn't about piracy, it was an invaluable resource to scholars and regular people alike in the difficult quest to archive, record and preserve the history of gaming. Every time something like this happens, I remind myself the only true thing about the industry: copyright has become a giant pile of stinky crap, managed by inapt hands for the blind bastards that climb their miserable Wall Street-based life for profit. Go fuck yourselves, you bastards.

http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=43107

1. What happened? TL;DR: We have legal problems. For details, see #9
2. Is this the same thing as with BG? BG's shutdown was pre-emptive. Trust me if I say that this one wasn't planned at all.
3. Does this mean UG is gone? No, we are not gone.
4. Is this related to you closing invites recently? This is what closing invites was supposed to prevent from happening.
5. How/when will we get to know more? irc://underground-gamer.com/#chat , we will release new information as it becomes available.
6. Is the user data safe? AFAIK no user data went anywhere. At least, no unencrypted data.
7. How are you sure it's safe? Scorched earth. Everything that COULD be wiped, was. Everything that could NOT be wiped was thoroughly encrypted.
8. Will UG be back? See #3. We can rebuild it. We have backups. We have the technology.
9. Further details? This is what is officially known:
[2013-05-31 10:53:40] <RetroJaro> Maybe it's just "get rid of GOG games." or something.
[2013-05-31 10:55:03] <lenk> Well, it's about games alright. But big publisher games. Like FIFA 98 and a few other well known ones virtually no one downloads.
[2013-05-31 10:56:15] <lenk> That's what you get when you have organizations whose sole purpose is scoring points by taking down sites. They don't care about what they take down. They just do what they are paid for.
[2013-05-31 10:57:49] <lenk> EA was just an example guys. Watchdogs represent much more than that.
[2013-05-31 11:03:49] <lenk> Companies don't care about UG. Copyright watchdogs make it their job though.

Underground Gamer is at least as much about the community and the absolutely staggering amount of amassed expertise and knowledge, as it is about the files. I obviously can't know or predict anything about what's going on, but it was always a community first, a torrent tracker second, so I'm confident that something will, in some way, continue.

As they say, this is what happens when it's no longer about businesses protecting their profits from the products they created, but lawyer hordes with the sole purpose of tracking down infringement (in an area where I'm tempted to say the infringement was really just an unfortunate technicality). This is the same thing as those "lawfirms" that google the web for sites mentioning certain trademarks, and then send out thousands of cease and desist letters per day.