Crack dot Com was a computer game development company co-founded by ex-

id Software 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: game programmer, programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer T ...

programmer Dave Taylor, and Jonathan Clark.

History

Crack dot com started from home with a staff of just four people. Their first completed game, which had Internal Revenue Service agents as the enemies, was never released. The company released only one game, '' Abuse'', an

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

scrolling platform shooter which sold over 80,000 copies worldwide. Based on a public

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

release, ''Abuse'' was

ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

to a wide variety of platforms including Microsoft Windows,

MacOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

, AIX, SGI Irix, Amiga/

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

, and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

. Prior to the company's closing in October 1998, 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. The game was never finished and Crack dot com made the source and data for ''Golgotha'' (as with ''Abuse'')

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

External links

official webpage
(offline, archived)

References

Defunct video game companies of the United States Video game development companies Video game companies disestablished in 1996 Video game companies disestablished in 1998 American companies disestablished in 1996 American companies disestablished in 1998 {{US-videogame-company-stub