If you were thinking about finding out if Linux had any games, where might you go? Well, if you type “Linux Games” into Google today or if you were to look up a website on the Yahoo! directory in the 90s, you would have ended up on LinuxGames.com.
During the early 2000s I was hanging out in the #loki IRC channel and had been writing for my own sites, a few weeks of pestering later and Dustin “Crusader” Reyes was good enough to give me a chance to write for LinuxGames.com.
There were always other sites like Happy Penguin, Holarse, and today the major place I would look to is Gaming on Linux, but we kept LinuxGames going through technology migrations and I was there to help move the site to a modern WordPress core.
For over a decade, LinuxGames was where I went when I wanted to write seriously about games on Linux, and that was where the readers were.
Yesterday I found out just like everybody else that the site’s host plans on shutting down or archiving LinuxGames.com and I could not have been more shocked:
After 17 years on the Internet, AtomicGamer, the site who has been hosting LinuxGames is shutting down at the end of the month. I think it is time also that we put LinuxGames to bed as well. It has been a wild and fascinating ride all these years watching the Linux community mature and come to age. The passion that created this site has left me years ago and I know it is time to put the site to rest.
I would like to personally thanks Dustin and Al for all their support thru the many years and well as the countless people who have contributed to this site over the years.
This is at a time when Valve is shipping their version of Linux called SteamOS with the help of third party computer builders and folks like the Humble Bundle and Ryan ‘icculus’ Gordon continue to bring many games to Linux. With no advertising the Facebook page I set up for LinuxGames has over 1300 Likes and the twitter account I set up has 650 followers.
It could not be a more interesting time to write about these developments.
There are so many other solutions than shutting down what has been a mainstay for the community of Linux gamers.
I have offered to host the site for free in the comments on the article, and hosting WordPress sites is something I’ve been doing for years.
Ryan ‘icculus’ Gordon has offered to buy the domain name.
@mmalkowskijr @TimeDoctor @gamingonlinux Wait, even if it doesn't continue, I'd like to keep the historical site. Can I buy the domain name?
— Ryan C. Gordon (@icculus) July 16, 2015
If you have a minute, please politely tweet @mmalkowskijr or comment on the news post, and encourage him to not let LinuxGames.com fade into oblivion.
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