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History

12th.jan.2005 Abandoneer was launched, originally named abandonWar.com (not aware of Mongy's site going by the same name, at abandonwar.net).
1st.feb.2005 abandonWar.com was renamed to Abandoneer, to avoid confusion with Mongy's site.

Development and release

Site development started by middle 2004, in Lone Lee's spare time, with the help of Tiago AZ. Soon Tiago had to leave the crew -- long before the site was launched. By that time, the site was being planned to be focused on inciting the movement for arrangements with the commercial gaming industry, including a manifesto and such (that's why the name abandonWar.com was chosen). The domain abandonwar.com was reserved in october of 2004, and by that time the domains abandonwar.net and abandonwar.org were still available. A few weeks later, Mongy's site AbandonWar, which had been online for a few years already, would be transfered to domain abandonwar.net.

Our site was officially released in 2005, january 12th, named abandonWar.com, offering no more than nine classic games downloads, with reviews and some game information. The manifesto project was purposedly left on hold -- Lone Lee decided to wait until having a sizeable support from the community, since the manifesto would have to be written and accepted by a majority of the important players on the scene to have any impact and serious effectiveness.

The site was introduced to the community through The Abandonware Forums and web rings (particularly the Abandonware Ring). Soon the community feedback brought Mongy's site to Lone Lee's attention. After a few days analysing the problem, it was decided that abandonWar.com had to be renamed while it was still fairly unknown, before it was too late to avoid serious confusion -- and specially because Mongy's AbandonWar was actually around for longer than our site, so it was fair that he kept his identity without us in the way.

It took about a week to choose a new name and make the proper adjustments. On february 1st, 20 days after being officially released, abandonWar.com was renamed into Abandoneer, on a new domain, with slight changes in the design.

Early evolution

In march 24th of 2005 the first classic application was added to Abandoneer -- After Dark 3.0.

The site has grown from 9 games on january 12th to 64 by the end of july. Still a small site, but growing fairly quickly (one game every four days, even considering we had to stop updating through all the month of june).