Type | Video game industry |
---|---|
Founded | 1996 |
Defunct | 1998 |
Products | Abuse |
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. [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]
id Software LLC is an American video game developer based in Richardson, Texas. It was founded on February 1, 1991, by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack.
Quake II is a 1997 first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. It is the second installment of the Quake series, following Quake. The game's storyline is continued in its expansions and Quake 4.
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John D. Carmack II is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels. Carmack made innovations in 3D computer graphics, such as his Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes.
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Dave D. Taylor is an American game programmer, best known as a former id Software employee and noted for his work promoting Linux gaming.
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Abuse is a run and gun video game developed by Crack dot Com and published by Electronic Arts in North America and Origin Systems in Europe. It was released on February 29, 1996 for MS-DOS. A Mac OS port of the game was published by Bungie and released on March 5, 1997. The game's source code, along with some of the shareware content, has been in the public domain since the late 1990s and has been ported to Linux and many other platforms.
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