Crack dot com started from home with a staff of just four people.^[2] Their first completed game, which had Internal Revenue Service agents as the enemies, was never released.^[2] The company released only one game, Abuse, an MS-DOS scrolling platform shooter which sold over 80,000 copies worldwide. Based on a public source code release, Abuse was ported to a wide variety of platforms including Microsoft Windows, MacOS, AIX, SGI Irix, Amiga/AmigaOS, and Linux.^[3]

Prior to the company's closing in October 1998,^[4] they were working on Golgotha, a hybrid of first-person shooter and real-time strategy. Citing publisher interference in the creative design of Abuse, Crack dot com opted not to accept any offers from publishers until the game was completed.^[2] The game was never finished and Crack dot com made the source and data for Golgotha (as with Abuse) public domain.

The company experienced a setback on January 13, 1997^[5] when their file server was broken into by way of their web server,^[6] and the source code to Golgotha and also the Quake engine they had licensed from id was stolen.^[7] This did result in a number of unofficial ports for Quake, including an SVGAlib version for Linux that was later mainlined by id,^[8] as well as unauthorized ports to OS/2, Amiga, Java VMs, and Mac OS.^[9] The source code for both Quake and Golgotha were later legally released.^[10]

Crack dot Com

Company type	Video game industry
Founded	1996
Defunct	1998
Products	Abuse

History

References

External links