Abandonware

What clever little children!

Abandonware or "oldwarez" are software (usually games) that are so old noone gives a shit if you pirate them anymore. There is a large community supporting the free distribution of Abandonware that consists mostly of 40-50 year-old Unix beards who have and will spend their entire lives fapping to the good old days of the PC speaker, 8-bit graphics, and completely retarded gameplay.

There are at least 100 websites devoted to the distribution of Abandonware, most of them are in the gray area legally because they disregard copyright laws, and assume they can host whatever they want until one of the developers actually threatens them with the party van. Fortunately for them, the developers of most of the games they host died out at the end of the Cretacious period. Some sites do, however, host more recent material amid large collections of one meg wonders, causing them to get flooded by 13 year old boys with hard drives chock full of spyware and trojans from the "0-DAY FULLVERSION 100% FREE WAREZ!!!" rat mazes they google up all afternoon. Thus, many of the bigger sites will beg you for money at every possible opportunity to pay for the high traffic.

List of "Unprotected" Software

• Daikatana
• Diablo
• Anything made by Sid Meier before the release of CivIV
• Anything made by LucasArts before 1997
• Doom
• Custer's Revenge
• Tons and tons and tons of unplayable shit nobody cares about

Abandonware Sites

• The Underdogs The biggest collection of oldies on the internets, also the recipient of more legal threats than the tobacco industry; their download servers died ages ago and you can't even get torrent files from them anymore
• Abandonia Almost in the same boat as the Underdogs, you can still probably download stuff at around 4k/s
• Freeoldies Abandonware search engine; all the good games are at the Underdogs or Abandonia