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Abandonia

Abandonia is an abandonware website, focusing mainly on showcasing computer games and distributing games made for the MS-DOS system.

Abandonia also features a music section and an Abandonware List, a continuously expanded database of over 4600 games including information about their publishers, release dates and whether according to the staff's knowledge the software is sold, protected or abandoned. This list is a sum total of research and enquiries made by the site crew, with sources including but not limited to MobyGames, Wikipedia and the company registry at Home of the Underdogs.

Abandonia Reloaded (sometimes referred to as "AR" or simply "Reloaded") is a sister project of Abandonia, with the focus upon freeware games.

Every game showcased is accompanied by a set of screenshots, and reviews written and proof-read by members. As non-profit sites, both Abandonia and Abandonia Reloaded are community-driven projects. With the exception of the featured games themselves, all content available on the sites is created by their community as a volunteer effort.

Both also feature a progressive system of game evaluation, in which the quality of the game is rated not just by the reviewer but also by votes of regular visitors.

History

Abandonia was created by Croatian Kosta Krauth on June 21, 1999. At that time Abandonia was a typical oldwarez site, with popular games like Monkey Island and Doom available for download, even though these games were still being sold in stores. The site gained a major boost in popularity throughout 2003 and 2004 as a discussion forum was opened, updates became more frequent, and the focus shifted towards abandoned games.

The site is maintained by people from all over the world, including Belgium, Holland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Poland and Croatia. At the present time Abandonia has been translated into German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Polish, Croatian, Norwegian, Slovene, Icelandic, Slovak and Romanian, in addition to the main English. Other translations currently being worked on include Hebrew and Russian.

In September 2006 Abandonia was acquired by Studentis Group, a Swedish online community company. This meant that Studentis would take over the hosting responsibilities for Abandonia and support its upcoming versions . In October 2007 Abandonia received a new layout and had been transferred over to the Drupal platform by Kosta Krauth and the Studentis team consisting of Marcus Johansson, Daniele Testa, Fredrik Holm and Carl McDade.

Software hosted on Abandonia

Abandonia's definition of abandonware is one of the more clearly defined (and possibly the most restrictive) in the abandonware scene. In order for a game to be considered abandoned - and therefore hosted on the site - it had to be pass three very specific criteria:

*First, the game has to be unavailable on the retail market and no longer distributed by its publishers nor by legitimate retailers in any form.

*Second, official support for the game must have been dropped both by its publisher and developer.

*Third, the game must not be under active protection of any anti-piracy agency, such as Entertainment Software Association, nor directly by the copyright holders themselves. If a legitimate copyright holder for any game requests its removal, any downloads of it (or links to thereof) present on the site and its forum will be subject to removal by site staff (although the review of the game would still remain onsite).

Only the PC version of the game needs to fulfill the above three criteria: whether any console versions do or do not is considered irrelevant, as Abandonia follows a strict policy to not deal with ROMS or disk images for non-PC systems.

If the site staff discovers that one of the games placed on the site no longer fulfills one of those criteria or has been accidentally misqualified as Abandonware when it was not such, they remove any downloads of that game on their own intiative.

In order to facilitate status identification for games not yet introduced in its abandonware list, the staff of Abandonia maintains a constantly updated list of known ESA member and subsidiary companies which can be found incorporated in the ruleset of the site's Requests forum .

Abandonia Reloaded

Abandonia Reloaded is a sister project of Abandonia dedicated to the development and distribution of freeware games. It was created on 2005-05-07 by Kosta Krauth, Monica Schoenthaler, Maikel Kersbergen & Tom Henrik Aaberg. The site is maintained by a large number of staff, most of whom are (or have previously been) involved with the original Abandonia.

History

The concept for AR was conceived by Kosta Krauth, Abandonia's owner, in 2004, due to a desire to separate independently produced freeware from the abandonware already featured on Abandonia. He was joined by Maikel Kersbergen and Tom Henrik, both already admins for Abandonia. Soon after, Monica Schoenthaler was invited to join the team. These four are listed as the original "Founders" of Abandonia Reloaded.

Although currently a major portion of AR's library of games is comprised of Adventure genre titles, it is currently expanded to offer a more diverse selection.

The games showcased on AR are both old commercial games released as freeware (like The Elder Scrolls: Arena, The Black Cauldron and Beneath a Steel Sky), in addition to newer independent freeware (like Ark 22, Trilby's Notes and Enclosure).

Nearly a year after its unveiling, AR was nominated for "Best New Site" by DaFastLane, a gaming news site.