A few months ago I wrote about how it is so difficult to submit games to Linux gaming sites, based on my experience with trying to spread the word about the latest update of Stop That Hero!
One of those sites is The Linux Game Tome. It was one of my favorite Linux gaming sites, and had an active forum for developers and players, as well as an IRC channel.
In recent times, it has been plagued with spam and hardware issues. Twice it had been down for months due to a faulty hard drive, for instance. These problems resulted in a lack of activity when it was finally back up. When they updated their forums last summer, it broke the ability to submit games to their database. To this day, Summoning Wars was the last game with an update in June of 2012.
Last month, there was a new post, however, and it wasn’t good news for fans.
The Linux Game Tome will shut down on April 13. Those of us who have maintained happypenguin.org over the years now lack both the time and the ambition to do what is necessary to keep the site afloat.
A later update provided a link to a dump of the game database, all 300+ MB of it, with the idea that someone might be able to recreate the site if they so choose to do so.
Since then, two forums have popped up about how to carry on without the original site operators. One is Resurrecting the Tome, and the other is The Linux Game Tome Ideas and Discussion. I’ll be interested in seeing what comes out of these discussions.
While my new favorite site is the active Gaming on Linux, The Linux Game Tome holds a special place in my heart. I thank Bob Zimbinski, aka bobz, for all he had done, and I wish him luck in whatever his future ambitions are.