[4] Achavanuntakul, a Thai journalist, had been in the United States at that time and wanted to play MicroProse's 1989 title Sword of the Samurai, as her copy had fallen apart.

[5] In January 2006, due to new responsibilities at work, Achavanuntakul had to step off running the site, allowing other admins to continue to maintain it.

[6] As the database of HOTU was released under a CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license in March 2009,[1][7] a team had been able to rehost the website as hotud.org by September 2009.

[9] Despite difficulties with providing direct access to abandonware, the new maintainers tried to reproduce the site's databases and reviews for these early video games.

[5] The site was considered critical towards helping with digital preservation, since most publishers at the time did not keep materials of games that they had taken out of print.