The sale of the premium, aged domain HighScore.com took place late last year with the help of domain brokerage Lumis.
The announcement stated:
“HighScore.com has been acquired. Great work to Adam for the assistance he provided, helping our client secure this domain at a fair rate. Congrats to the buyer!”
Registered in 1996, HighScore.com appears to be in the hands of a California-based startup with a focus on cloud gaming; its product will allow gamers to take their favorite games from most platforms inside the browser. Google tried that with Stadia a few years ago but its model failed to attract traction and it closed down.
It would have been a great acquisition if it weren’t for the fact that the domain hosted an active community of gamers for years. The old web site at HighScore.com allowed game aficionados to gamify the process of sharing their high scores with the entire community.
The sale of the domain did not transfer over the content or platform; the members of the old community were left stranded and are looking for answers. Some joined the new company’s Discord channel, seeking to recover their high scores:
The Discord channel operators’ answers might have upset some:
“Apologies – the previous owner of the site gave no indication that it was still an active site when highscore.com was transferred to us. We’re going to reach out to see if the old owner still has the site + scores – they might be able to put the site back up under a new domain, but no guarantees that they still have it.”
Not everyone would be happy with the outcome as the HighScore.com web site served as “proof of achievement” for people’s high scores in a number of games, with more than 125,000 high score entries.
An additional answer points to the seller’s current information:
“We followed up with the original owner of `highscore.com` – they told us to direct any inquiries / questions about the old site to `serious@seriousatari.com`. We tried to ask for some additional information / a status update on the old site, but for now, that’s all they gave us. Will let you all know if we hear anything else, but sorry we don’t have better news at the moment!”
There is no indication if the registrant of SeriousAtari.com, a domain parked at GoDaddy, retained the database and forum of the old web site hosted on HighScore.com.
