Underground Gamer gone :(

[Anne Summers]

Shocked to find this out today when I went there for a random browse as i have done every week or so for the last however many years it's been open!
This was definitely my favourite ever retro gaming resource, since I got an invitation from someone on here I think, it has pretty much turned up every random ROM I fancied playing, no matter how obscure.

Anyone know good alternatives? Although hopefully it won't be gone forever, obviously from what we've seen in the past it isn't usually good news when a site disappears citing "legal problems".

(I hope it isn't anything to do with them taking donation - I noticed a couple of years ago they seemed to take the bit out of their FAQ saying that "You will never be able to buy download credit with donations", and there was something on there saying along the lines of "Just make one donation and your download restrictions will be lifted for life".

In my non-lawyer opinion , that's basically changing it from being a site which facilitates sharing of legally-dubious content for no profit, to a site fairly openly selling access to legally-dubious content - which is a big change in the eyes of the Law.

Hopefully it's nothing to do with that though

Edit: Found this pastebin through their IRC

1. 1. What happened? TL;DR: We have legal problems. For details, see #9
2. 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. 3. Does this mean UG is gone? No, we are not gone.
4. 4. Is this related to you closing invites recently? This is what closing invites was supposed to prevent from happening.
5. 5. How/when will we get to know more? irc://underground-gamer.com/#chat , we will release new information as it becomes available.
6. 6. Is the user data safe? AFAIK no user data went anywhere. At least, no unencrypted data.
7. 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. 8. Will UG be back? See #3. We can rebuild it. We have backups. We have the technology.
9. 9. Further details? This is what is officially known:
10. [2013-05-31 10:53:40] <RetroJaro> Maybe it's just "get rid of GOG games." or something.
11. [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.
12. [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.
13. [2013-05-31 10:57:49] <lenk> EA was just an example guys. Watchdogs represent much more than that.
14. [2013-05-31 11:03:49] <lenk> Companies don't care about UG. Copyright watchdogs make it their job though.

GOG mentioned within was one of my other fears about why this could have happened - always seemed fairly cheeky to me the way they had a separate filter to allow anyone to just browse the GOG releases. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I have too much of an ethical dilemma ripping of GOG occasionally, as I don't know how much of the money they charge for basically repackaging games as Dosbox exes actually goes to the people who created these games.