About anarchy
Welcome to anarchy. Although the design is called anarchy v8, to my knowledge this is the fifth incarnation and fourth design of anarchy.
Before I go any further, I must thank voh for the lovely work he did on the design. Look, I didn't even insult it. Or you. Not even once. That must be a record. Ahem.
anarchy aims to review and offer for download abandonware in as ethical a way as possible. My current policy on adding games follows
- The game must not be still on sale by the copyright holder.
- I must either have consent to offer the game for download, or;
- There must be no obvious copyright holder.
The reasoning is quite simple. If you offer for download a game who still has an obvious owner (either the original copyright holder, or whoever bought it / the company) then they might lose sales if they decide to start selling it again. Thus, they might be hesitant to sell it again, since everyone's already downloaded a copy. It also saves me hassle from people going "hay stop letting people download this game I'm not making any money from anyway", but this is merely an added bonus.
I also hope to add some indie games. In particular, I'd like to give credit to people that make games without having traditional programming skills - such as games made in AGS, etc.
As for anarchy's history, the following is a transcript of an email I sent to the guys at Da Fast Lane so they could write up a shorter version there.
v1 (purple): ??/09/2000 - 29?/12/2000
v2 (voh): 29/12/2000 - 13/02/2001
v3 (voh): 02/08/2001 - ?
v4 (greyscale): 03/05/2002 - ??/08?/2002
I opened anarchy in September 2000 after lurking around the scene for maybe a year. I'm still not sure why, but I think my feeling was that there was no real abandonware sites with consistently good, lengthy reviews. The closest we had at that time was BSOD, which was (and is) one of my favourite sites. There were other sites with decent reviews, but not consistently. Sites like Classic Trash and the Keep had some good reviews, and some two line reviews.
Back then I joined tuol, RoA, and TACT. TACT was awesome, and blargy was awesome enough to think (quite rightly ;/) that my reviews were maybe even better than voh's on BSOD.
I started talking to vohaul on IRC, and he liked anarchy, but he said the design was shit (it was shit, I did it in dreamweaver before I had any Clue). He promptly offered a new design - probably his best yet - and more importantly, taught me how to use SSI (server side includes), which make updating the site way more easy. So as I remember, anarchy was replaced by anarchy v2 on 29/12/2000, with a new gamelist, new reviews, and a new design.
At some point during v2, I took on another crew member - I don't remember who, nobody prominent or even known now - but his reviews were not as sexy as mine, and I think he left of his own accord at some point.
I decided to close v2 due to personal reasons somewhere around 13/02/2001.
I reopened anarchy as v3 with the same design, and tried something new - multiple page designs with screenshots thrown around rather than being in a collected place, to add some style. While I liked the screenshots, the multiple pages weren't really necessary, and this led to the site being hard to maintain, so I left it to rot for a while. Not sure when I closed it.
I started v4 with my own design - completely greyscale - on 03/05/2002. It was nice, functional, but not as sexy as voh's. This saw another abandonware first from me as being the first site to offer a WAP version - so you could read the reviews on the train or whatever and decide if anything's worth leeching maybe. Obviously this was pretty pointless, but it was at a time when I was experimenting with WAP and WML, so what the hell. It's even more redundant now since most phones these days can use the proper www.
Anyway, this site went back to the roots a bit, simple, long reviews, screenshots, etc. - the main difference being it was easier for me to update, as it was all dynamic and database driven, my first use of php/mysql in an abandonware site, in fact. Unfortunately, I opened the site at probably the worst point in my life to do so, and it got left to rot, again, for a couple of months.
Sometime in August(?) 2002, I put up a little note saying I'd be back sometime, and while I never really left the scene as a whole, I did leave all my sites behind (probably including my AP updates). I still haven't made good on the promise of anarchy coming back, but since I'm at a stable point in my life, I'm aiming for a release date of sometime in October, and I already have a sexy new design from voh.
That email was sent in 2005 (03/08/05) so I'm actually nearly a year late for the release date I was aiming for. Nevermind.