Crack dot Com should not be confused with Cracked.com.
| Crack dot Com | |
| Type: | Video game industry |
| Predecessors: | --> |
| Successors: | --> |
| Founded: | 1996 |
| Founders: | --> |
| Defunct: | 1998 |
| Areas Served: | --> |
| Products: | Abuse |
| Owners: | --> |
Crack dot Com was a computer game development company co-founded by ex-id Software programmer Dave Taylor, and Jonathan Clark.[1]
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.
Prior to the company's closing in October 1998,[3] 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[4] when their file server was broken into by way of their web server,[5] and the source code to Golgotha and also the Quake engine they had licensed from id was stolen.[6] This did result in a number of unofficial ports for Quake, including an SVGAlib version for Linux that was later mainlined by id,[7] as well as unauthorized ports to OS/2, Amiga, Java VMs, and Mac OS.[8] The source code for both Quake and Golgotha were later legally released.[9]