By Jonathan "JC" Clark

Since the announcement of the demise of Crack Dot Com I have
been getting a lot of mail. The biggest question seems to be
"why?". Abuse, Crack's first product, was one of those
shareware games made on a shoe string budget by a "green
team". Yet, it made it big in the commercial world, and many
small developers hoping to do the same have looked at Crack
dot Com as a role model. Fans addicted to Abuse anxiously
awaited our next product with the expectation that it would
be even better. When Crack Dot Com died, a lot of people
wanted to know why or how this happened. So unfolds the
story.

After finishing Abuse and receiving our first of many
royalty checks for $250,000, we moved out of the apartment
we working out of and into a real office. I begin developing
Golgotha with very little knowledge of 3D computer graphics.
At the time, the 3D gaming industry was just beginning, and
no one knew for sure which way it would go. We knew it was
going to big, and we wanted in on it. It was unclear at the
time how important software rendering was going to be. We
didn't know what features were going to be hardware
accelerated, and which weren't. We could only guess at which
3D API would be the best supported.

The second big unknown was what kind of game would we make?
We had just spent way to much time working on Abuse and
didn't want to even think about Abuse II. The first idea we
had was to make something like Gauntlet 3D. Gauntlet, for
those of you who don 't remember, was a multiplayer arcade
game where you could pick between 4 characters and run
around and kill, kill, kill, eat food, and collect
treasures.

The way we were going to approach Gauntlet 3D was by letting
the artist model the world in extremely complex detail and
we would render out movie quality frames along a preset
branching camera path. This idea is similar to an arcade
game Area 51, except we were going to store a Z-buffer which
would allow characters to be drawn into the scene freely and
also we would have much more camera angles making the game
less linear.

A problem we encountered was that modeling a realistic
environment was a huge task. Adding to the difficulty of the
task, our artist had no experience in the field. I remember
in a particular level we wanted to have a dungeon. A certain
artist begin by c reating a single brick, then duplicating
it several thousand times and building a wall out of the
bricks. He kept complaining that his machine was too slow
when he tried to render it. Needless to say this is not the
best way to model a brick wall.

Another idea we entertained was a game called "Assassin" in
which you play the part of an assassin who gets a mission to
kill some famous person. You get the blueprints to their
house, a list of weapons, and maybe some information about
their bodyguards. We thought it would be great if we could
have a mission where you could actually kill a certain
famous political figure. We figured the publicity for such a
game would be very strong and more importantly, free. But,
it posed a number of burning legal qu estions. It is very
illegal to even talk about killing the president of the
United States. If we were to make a game about it, could we
be arrested, or even worse, everyone who played the game? I
called the FBI, CIA, secret service, the defense departmen
t, the pentagon, and several lawyers, but I couldn't get a
straight answer. We quickly decided maybe it wasn't a good
idea!

About this time we got hooked on playing a little game
called Command and Conquer (C&C). This game was fun! Very
fun. We wanted to make a game just like it, but we also
wanted to make something 3D. The only fun 3D game I had ever
played was Doom. This st ill holds true today for me.
Naturally the thought occurred "Doom meets Command and
Conquer". But what does this mean actually? Do you play
first person driving in one of the vehicles, or maybe you
can switch to any vehicle at anytime and take control. W e
played with many combinations of these ideas, but they never
seemed to be what we were looking for. The problem boils
down to : In Doom you are single character only concerned
about your health and what's behind the corner, In C&C : you
are a mastermin d global strategist where everyone is
expendable and you only care about how you are doing
overall. The two don't work together. It seems obvious now,
but we thought there had to be a way to make it work.

After discovering we couldn't make it have the level of fun
we were looking for with "Doom meets C&C", we considered two
options. One options was to make the game more action (Doom)
based, the other was to make it more strategy based (C&C).
First we trie d the C&C approach, but the theory was that
without fancy camera angles, it's hard to compete with the
2D strategy games coming out because of they can have more
characters and better artwork. Then, we tried an action
version, which is what you see in th e final release. To
make the game more action oriented we had to simplify the
strategy aspect. This meant not spending all of your time
"micro managing" units by clicking on them and then their
destination/target. We setup up a system where all the paths
that a vehicle could travel on where predefined by the level
designer and you could only select a current path and then
build a vehicle. Once built, the vehicle would travel down
the path, fighting all the way, until it reached it's
destination or was k illed. This concept is similar to an
old Apple game called Rescue Raiders. So, since you were not
tied up planning strategy all the time, the world was your
to explore in the first person. The problem that occurred
here, is that all the vehicles would tr avel in straight
lines and it was like shooting ducks at the county fair.

While all this planning, designing, and throwing away of
ideas was occurring, money was being spent. Lots of it.
Salary, rent, and other expenses took a ~$30K chunk out of
bank every month. We had grown from 3 to 9 people and moved
into a bigger office. To keep up with cost, we signed a deal
to publish in Europe and Australia with TeleStar, and a deal
to publish a Linux version with Red Hat. We also inked a
deal with AMD to add AMD-3D acceleration, and we were in the
process of talking with 3D sound car d people, and specific
3D card people. Each time we signed a deal we put money in
our pockets to keep us going, but we added more time to the
project by having to promise certain things. As the water
treading continued, the world was changing around us. Now,
the minimum spec machine was not a P-133, 3d acceleration
was a must, and other similar games had come out (Uprising &
Battlezone). The games that came out didn't offer us any
clues on how to make this genre fun. They also sold really
poorly which w as a signal to publishers that we would have
a similar fate. This made finding the great publishing deal
we had been holding out for for so long a near impossible
task.

Around July, Crack first missed payroll. August came and we
moved out of the office. September offered no new news, so
we decided to call it quits. Rather than letting all that
hard work sit around and rot, we released it to the public
domain. After doin g the same with Abuse and getting a
tremendous response, we had to. Some people have said
"Aren't you worried someone else could pick it up, finish
the game and sell it". The answer is no. I don't mind if
someone makes a profit off this work, which is a definite
possibility. I think the engine can be used to make many
different games, and I hope someone does just that. The
soundtrack could be sold to a record, game, or movie company
for 100k or more, and the textures have a fair value as
well. But with debt that Crack dot Com accrued, even these
sales would not have helped. We would much rather see other
people learn from our work and our mistakes.

The experience gained by going through this process has
helped me understand the business world in a way that I
could never learn by reading about it or studying it in
school. Personnel, management, accounting, and planning are
skills just as important a s the required technical skills
in the computer industry. The only real way to learn these
skills is through practice. Once you see how it all works
and that you can do it, you are not afraid to try again.

Almost a year ago, I had an idea for some new networking
technology that I felt could change the software industry in
a big way. When Crack first missed payroll, I saw it as an
opportunity to develop this technology and start a company
that uses it. I ha ve been working on it non stop since,
pausing only to package up the data from Golgotha and place
it at http://crack.com/golgotha_release. Because of the
nature of the business I'm not able to discuss the details
yet, but I am soliciting resumes and investors at
http://crack.com/startup2.