Underground Gamer

About
Underground Games (UG) was a games tracker that only allowed games that had an original release date before January 1, 2004. The users were very dedicated to filling their archives and succeeded in finding most games, including demos and manuals for many popular systems. Among their treasures were complete GoodSNES, GoodGen, GoodNES, GoodN64, MAME, Game Boy + Color, and Dreamcast collections.

There was no type of bonus system however a unique aspect of UG was their spirit system. Spirit was gained through things like uploading, seeding, posting on forums, and inviting users. It didn't have any practical purpose but was used for bragging rights and had placed a fun somewhat random smiley next to your name depending on how much spirit you had.

Golden Torrent was a term used to refer to torrents that fulfilled all of their expectations in terms of packaging, organization, and quality. These were to serve as role models for what other torrents should aim for.

Another thing that made UG stand out was the fact that the staff were paying 100% of the server costs. They weren't relying on donations like most trackers.

IRC
Server: irc.underground-gamer.com

Port: 6667

Channel(s): #Chat

2006
February - The tracker was launched

2008
June 23 - There are 22000 users and 8000 torrents on the tracker.

2010
January 14 - All users are stripped of their invites. Someone reported them to their hosting company as a "warez site", luckily after some discussions the host was understanding.

May ~4 - A malicious user who was on many private trackers got UG shut down by their hosting company by claiming they were from an anti-piracy organization and UG was hosting copyrighted files. Measures were taken to get the user blacklisted from all major private trackers but recovery was slow due to picking a new host.

July 7 - At this time there are over 28000 registered users with another 2000 slots just opened up. There are also over 11500 torrents being tracked.

2013
January 5th - With the announcement of bitGamer shutting down Underground Gamer opens its doors and offers to house many bitGamer refugees. In order to accommodate all the new users the user limit is raised. After a couple days bitGamer users were even allowed to import their bitGamer ratios to UG.

May 31 - iRC Topic says "It's true. The staff is still busy dealing with the situation. More details will follow soon. || Stop the panic and the drama. We're still here, it ain't over till we say so."

June 19 - Underground Gamer is officially gone for good. Staff ran into legal problems, citing FIFA 98 and a few other games as the target of copyright watchdogs. "Everything on the server that could be wiped, was, and everything that could not be wiped was thoroughly encrypted"