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Crack for Sale 68

Posted by CmdrTaco from the blatant-promotion-of-something-silly dept.
Dave Taylor and Jonathon Clark wrote in to tell us that they are selling the Crack.com domain name. If you haven't heard of these guys, then you live in a box. If you haven't played Abuse or tracked Golgatha, then you also live in a box. Check out the action on the eBay auction page. As of when I saved this story, the top bid is $15k, which is is still quite a bargain for all that crack. And good luck to you guys, and thanks for Abuse. (I'm not sure which is more fun to say: "Crack for Sale" or "Thanks for Abuse" ;)
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Crack for Sale More

Crack for Sale

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  • Re:It's even more ludicrous... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Most traffic to crack.com is related to warez and copy protection subversion.

  • Re:Fifteen Thousand?!? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    imagine the money 500k a month hits could bring in just from people who are just going to the domain just because it's there!
    I would pay well over 15k for it if i had that much money :~(

  • Oh, please (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "If you haven't heard of these guys, then you live in a box. If you haven't played Abuse or tracked Golgatha, then you also live in a box."

    Can we please stop the "anyone in the world who deosn't share my interests is a jerk" posturing? It's a big world, full of people with widely differing experiences and viewpoints.

    And not everyone gets a sophomoric thrill out of saying "Crack for sale".

  • One of the great things about Abuse... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...was that it was written (at least in part) in LISP. Talk about abuse.
  • but when I saw this all I could hear was Talking Head's "Love For Sale"

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • Has anyone any idea where the Golgotha Forever's updated source is hiding?

    The project seems to be dead now (once again) and their web pages at golgotha.opengames.org seem to have vanished. Does anyone know where I could find a recent tarball of the source and stuff?

    I know that there are some mirrors of the original the-day-it-was-released data and source tarballs around, but what about the updated source and developed story stuff?

  • This post sounds a lot like the reaction I get when I offer people Coke Cake [clemson.edu]. Yes, it's got Coke in it.
  • According to this link:

    http://www.de.debian.org/Bugs/db/41/41543.html

    Abuse only works in 8bpp, so I guess you'll have to go to 256 colours, or just give up.

    Good luck,

    Ben
  • I've never heard of crack.com in reference to a game? named Abuse or Golgotha or whatever. Another domainname for sale. Why is it still considered a novelty when domains change hands? After this many years, it just seems repetitive, and droll to announce something that happens everyday.

    Often wrong but never in doubt.
    I am Jack9.
  • Definitely. I remember downloading it years ago on my 486, tweaking my settings so that it would run properly, and being scared shitless playing at midnight with the sound cranked up.

    An amazing game. It's up there with Star Control 2 on the "best games ever" list.
  • Of course you don't live in a box. Who the hell heard of a "jack in a box"?!
  • 500K pageviews? Less than $300/month given the current ad rates. On the other hand this could be the killer B2C site that everyones been waiting for ;)
  • You can find the announcement on alt.domain-names.forsale here [deja.com].

  • What could you possibly market with such a domain name?

    Uhhh...a security-related site, perhaps? Come on, easy one there. If this post was modded up as "funny", I could see that, but I get the impression that you're serious...

  • nice.
    i love it.

  • Re:wo0f? (Score:1)

    by ff ( 35380 )
    not as good, but i like it nevertheless.
  • I think if the reserve isn't met, they don't sell through ebay, and then they don't have to pay ebay the commission, but instead keep it for themselves

    Good way to use ebay for cheap. Looks like it would cost $2 or so for a 2 billion dollar reserve that isn't met. Looks like a sweet scam to me.
  • Using MITSHM extension!
    X windows screen type not supported
    rares@moonbase:~$
  • apparently i live in a box.

    someone enlighten me, what are Abuse and Golgotha and what do they have to do with crack?

    this also reminds me of this great story about when my long-time drug dealer started doing crack. to make a long story short, he phoned and asked me some rediculously silly questions and a person overhearing this (with no knowledge of the situation) said "is that guy on crack?" and i actually got to say "yes." hahahahaah ..

    oh shit that was funny .. uh, ya just had to be there.

    - j
  • Doesnt crack sorta sell its self?
  • If they sell it before the reserve is met, they won't have to pay eBay's selling fees!!! Damn, that's a good idea!

  • crack.com

    Do you mean to say that the government isn't all over this for their drug distribution er, I mean enforcement departments?

  • we open source programmers just don't make that kind of money :P
  • and please don't try to bring it back. I appreciated ascii porn when LYNX was all i could use... but this is going a bit far.
  • If you haven't heard of these guys, then you live in a box. If you haven't played Abuse or tracked Golgatha, then you also live in a box.

    OK, I live in a box. But it's over a nice warm grating and it's on the bus line. So ner!

  • They should have sold it back in the days when business.com sold for $7 million... at that time, a "crack portal" would have probably seemed like a good idea, since that's what they must have been on anyway to think business.com was worth $7 million.
  • is that legal?
  • you've just described, for the most part, the next four years of my life. ;)

    eudas, student.
  • Abuse was fun, but is the sale of Crack.com really important news? ehow many slashdot readers are interested in this domain, let alone care? ah well, I still visit slashdot multiple times daily and enjoy it so i can't complain much.
  • "Wow, I live in a box!"
  • Seriously. What happened to a little old-fashioned domain name creativity? When Staples.register.com was having that domain names for $1 deal, I registered 12. Given, they're all really bizarre, like hazardousmonkeys.com, whydontyougoaway.com, DeathBySpork.com, InbredYokels.com, and WenchHunt.com, but still..
  • It's a big world full of Crack. And it's for sale!
  • pure genius
  • Sorry, wipe one from the list. Thanks for the idea. I just registered mybuttcrack.com. What a great email address to register with for all the spammers: kiss@mybuttcrack.com

  • Re:Eh? (Score:1)

    by skt ( 248449 )
    I barely remember that company also. IIRC, they were working on a FPS when they ran out of money and had to shut the entire project down. They released the code to the community so someone could finish the game for them. But that was years ago, I imagine that someone has done something with this by now.
  • you probably won't live to know the answers.Get with it.This is a problem'not an answer.
  • You forgot, this is slashdot. It is automatically assumed that everyone here is exactly the same: a teenage male, geeky, slightly neurotic, and definitely social inert person. Of course, if you don't fit that mold, then you don't belong here.

    Keep in mind that this is coming from a 27 year old male, happily married, about to start a family, extremely relaxed and basically (not perfect, but) well adjusted person. Guess I'd better leave now.

  • Although it's a shame to see an endeavor like crack.dom officially coming to an end, at least it's ending while still making money for Dave Taylor and Jonathon Clark. No matter how much the crack.com domain is bought for, it will still be enough to be more of a profit than most computer gaming businesses will ever see.

    Dave Taylor + Jonathon Clark = Class Act!
  • Slashdot : crack for the junkies. ash that matters.
  • I don't think 15k is a lot for that kind of domain.. esp. one that'll generate visitors on the basis of its name alone.

    I wonder how high this will go... my estimate is $25k ... any bets?

    Moz.
  • Hey, for those of you who still enjoy Abuse...

    There is a free 'distribution' of Abuse called fRaBs available on the net, from the link at http://www.abuse2.com

    fRaBs features 16 new single-player levels, 21 new deathmatch levels, new artwork, a new weapon, and all sorts of cool jazz... all brought together by the Abuse user community, and arranged together for ease of use. The fRaBs project has been going on for a little more than a year now, and version 2.1 was released only a few hours ago. Considering that new versions of fRaBs are released months apart, this would be a good time to check it out.

    Also, a brand new Windows DirectX port of Abuse with DirectPlay support is in the works. Ever wanted to try Abuse over TCP/IP? :) Keep checking abuse2.com for more info on this.

    Finally, here's a direct link to the fRaBs homepage... with plenty of information on what's been happening in the last year or so with Abuse, as well as other cool pictures and things to read.

    http://www.cs.uidaho.edu/~cass0664/fRaBs/

    Abuse and crack dot com forever baby,
    Justin Cassidy
  • Crack goes for $3! Don't you forget it! Its for sale (anonymously) here: cheap, $3 moderator crack [goatse.cx]! While supplies last!

    -Kyle

    Trolling for Ralph Nader

  • not according to my geo 401 prof :)...

    Do me a favor, and tell him that he's an idiot for me. You might be able to pin the age of the earth to two significant figures (albeit imprecisely), but three is just absurd.

    And this guy is teaching science!! You would think that a university professor would have enough brains to know that the margin of error is greater than the number of significant digits he's quoting. Hey, I know, I think the earth is actually 4.5767855 years old.

    Actually, I would be most amused if you asked him what the margin of error in the number is. I bet he can't even tell you.

  • For those of you interested in trying abuse, remember its available using apt-get/dselect in Debian.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Not only does ti redirect to buy.com, but it redirects to their _comptuer_ homepage... Thats got to make you wonder...

    Mark Duell
  • 15K? That's absurd. The last time I had mod points, the stret value of crack was around $3.00 a rock.


    Yes, but this is for some 500,000 hits a month! A bargain compared to your price of ($3.00 * 500,000) $1.5 million.

  • The whole "domain business" is something of a joke. Go over to Great Domains [greatdomains.com] (now a unit of Network Solutions) and notice the asking prices of domains vs. the prices people are actually paying. There are many domains with six-figure prices with no buyer in sight.

    A big percentage of those "bulk domains" will probably be dropped when renewal time comes around.

  • At 15k, it's a bargain. even witht the new TLS's coming online, .com is still where the money is. (except maybe for the $2000 price tag of .biz) It'd be a good investment.

    It'll probably turn out that a plumber buys it though.
  • Well, it's sad to see it all come to an end. Even after Crack closed it's doors, crack.com was still there, a reminder of what had been. I remember when it was hosted on a Mac connected via 56K dialup. Such a group of talent has rarely been assembled. I hope the price keeps climbing. $15K is nowhere close to the money that was put into Crack. Good luck, Dave & Jonathan. Hi Oliver!

    -Mike
  • Instead, they have to pay the 'Reserve not met' fee. Damn, that's a real shafting.

    Tell me what makes you so afraid
    Of all those people you say you hate

  • Hey DDT [slashdot.org],

    Just out of curiosity, what did you set the reserve price to? If it were me, I'd probably want at least $100K (and maybe more). That's a great domain name.


    --

  • Haiku (Score:2)

    by 575 ( 195442 )
    Crack dot com for sale
    Perhaps it will be sold to
    Virtual Crack Rock [virtualcrack.com]
  • the $15K shouldn't matter, as it's not yet up to the reserve, and who knows what that is... *BUT* then there's this detail on the site: "The name will be sold before the reserve is met, so don't wait until the last minute to bid." Huh? If you set a reserve price, why sell it before it's met - you know folks are going to test the reserve, and a bid below the reserve price is non-binding. Either there's some confusion here, or else these guys don't need the money, or else this is the equivalent of a pawn-shop deal on eBay... You mean this isn't the part-time-plumbing repair union site (with apologies to Bill Murray's old SNL bit...)
  • Go figure. I guess Slashdot really is a tight community, and I'm an outsider. What about acid.com or speed.com; are they for sale?
  • I loved playing Abuse.
    Hope crack dot com sale gets JC enough money to continue big time development...

    err...yeah! Thanks for Abuse.
    :-)

  • It's amazing... I'm afraid I'd have to admit that I was a bit late to discover "Abuse", but in this day and age of overblown FPS, 3GHz minimum system requirements and whatnot... I stumbled upon Abuse in the clearance bins at Fry's Electronics. Only $10, why the hell not? This ended up becoming one of the BEST games I've ever played, for entertainment value alone. I've never had a game scare the shit out of me so bad. Quake3? *yawn* Abuse? Suspense will kill you if you play it in a dark room at 4am in the morning with your speakers close by and reciever cranked up.

    Yeah, I bought Abuse long after Crack Dot Com closed its doors, but it's too bad the spirit of the company probably won't be kept alive when this domain finally changes hands.

    It's been a long while since I bought Abuse, and it's still up there as one of the better games I've played in my life. Good job, boys.

  • Most people who read Slashdot are college kids who got admitted to the CompSci department on their Math SAT scores alone, overlooking their embarassingly mediocre English score.

    They then have proceeded to waste some of their best drinking years of their life by hanging out in the computer lab or on IRC and generally avoiding any sort of liberal arts or humanities class that they absolutely did not have to take. This is necesssary because those classes have many girls in them and professors that used to smoke dope 20 years ago, both of which make the Average Slashdot Reader very nervous and anxious to get back on IRC in the computer lab.

    So, consequentally, when the Average Slashdot Reader gets his turn at moderation points, he is puzzled at the strange word "Insightful" and not quite sure what it means. He could go and look it up, but that would be something that a tweed jacketed dope smoking liberal arts professor would do. So feeling that "Score 5:Insightful" has a nice ring to it, he doles the label out onto posts which have a blunt sort of humor that the Average Slashdot Reader can recognize as not quite funny, but generally recognizable as humor. Since he can't quite articulate quite what that sort of post is, "Insightful" is good enough and then he moves on with his day, back on IRC or off to the cold girlless labs.

  • Hmmm... (Score:3)

    by ff ( 35380 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @08:16AM (#569941) Homepage
    Hmm... along with heroin.com and cocaine.com, this domain name is a great opportunity for any enterprising urban businessman.

  • From Abuse FAQ

    "Purchasing Abuse
    Is Abuse Public Domain?
    The source code, artwork, and shareware levels (1-4) are public domain. This means you are free to copy, sell, or modify it with no restrictions. To get this point across you can do the following:

    1.You can write a book about games and include the data on CD with the book. Some people have done this already.
    2.You can put the data on a FTP or web site without asking permission to do so. People have done this many times as well.

    3.You can make your own game based off of the Abuse source and artwork and sell it as your own. As noted below you can't call the game Abuse or Abuse 2 because the name is trademarked.

    Data that is not public domain:

    1. The sound effects in Abuse are owned by Bobby Prince (contact http://bpmusic.com). Since we do not own them we cannot make them public domain, but you should not have a problem using them in most cases. Besides they are 8bit 11khz, games these days are expected to have higher quality.

    2. The levels with commercial Abuse (4+) are not public domain. We did not make them public domain because some stores are still selling the game."

    fyi
  • (heh, heh..)

    Jokes aside, though:

    "Crack was a game company started in 1995 by Dave Taylor and Jonathan Clark. Taylor was working at id Software and had co-authored Doom and Quake. Clark was fresh out of college, burning to start his own game company and had already written a smooth, capable 2D scroller engine. The engine became Abuse, a 2D scroller still unique to this day for supporting a 360-degree aiming mechanism, a built-in editor, real-time lighting, a LISP interpreter, and portability to several platforms, including DOS, MacOS, Linux, Irix, BeOS, and others."

    from crack.com

    That sounds pretty useful

  • Comment removed (Score:4)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @08:50AM (#569944)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • buycrack.com (Score:4)

    by rograndom ( 112079 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @08:44AM (#569945) Homepage

    Does it bother anyone else that buycrack.com [buycrack.com] redirects to buy.com [buy.com]?

  • Crack.eh-hem (Score:4)

    by grovertime ( 237798 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @08:24AM (#569946) Homepage
    You'd think with Slashdot's slew of ICANN postings regarding the new 7 domains, they would have considered this vantage in this story:
    1. How could crack.com ever sell for much when really solid, wonderful domains like crack.museum, crack.coop, crack.biz, and crack.asleepatthewheel are still available?


    1. humor for the clinically insane [mikegallay.com]

  • It's even more ludicrous... (Score:5)

    by bonzoesc ( 155812 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @09:06AM (#569947) Homepage
    at $15k, haven't even had their reserve met. Are they holding out for somebody so rich they could be a ... crack ... dealer?? (dr. evil accent & pinky to mouth) What could you possibly market with such a domain name?
    • Illegal drugs
    • Butt porn
    • Windshield repair
    • Plumbing (redundant)
    • The sound a baseball bat makes when you hit the ball
    • Eggs?
    Not a lot, compared to something like (fill in blank).

    Tell me what makes you so afraid
    Of all those people you say you hate

  • Fifteen Thousand?!? (Score:5)

    by atrowe ( 209484 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @08:22AM (#569948)
    15K? That's absurd. The last time I had mod points, the stret value of crack was around $3.00 a rock.

  • Re:living in a box (Score:5)

    by skt ( 248449 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @09:20AM (#569949)
    bluesnews: [bluesnews.com]

    Crack Falls Down [2:03 AM EDT] The official announcement that Dave Taylor mentioned in an earlier .plan update of what's up with Crack and the Golgotha source has worked its way through the net. On the subject of the source, a later .plan update points out, "To those of you grabbing the source, you only need golgotha_src.zip to get started. Also, we goofed on the music name, it's "Helsinki, Finland", not "Helsinki, Sweden". *blush*" Here's the whole sad tale, told in good spirits:

    WHAT: Crack dot Com is closing its doors.

    WHY: Ran out of cash.

    REALLY WHY: Lot of reasons, but then again, there are a lot of reasons that we got as far as we did. I think the killer reason, though, was that Golgotha was compared by publishers primarily to Battlezone and Uprising, and those titles sold really poorly.

    WHAT NOW?: Now we file articles of dissolution w/ the secretary of state, and we file bankruptcy.

    IS THAT IT?!: No.

    WHAT ELSE?: We're releasing the Golgotha source code, and data to the public domain.

    HELL YES! WHERE'S THE SOURCE CODE?: I want to personally thank everyone who supported & rooted for us. That was really nice of you.

    YEAH YEAH, BLAH BLAH, WHERE'S THE SOURCE?: I want to apologize to the fans and business partners we've let down.

    BOO HOO! WE CARE. OUT WITH IT!: Thanks for your patience. The source & data can be found at http://www.crack.com/golgotha_release. And of course, the ex-Crack developers are up to new & interesting things which you can follow at the web site.

    WAIT A MINUTE. IS THIS STUFF FREE BECAUSE IT SUCKS?: No. Even if you thought the code sucked, there are 15 gorgeous pieces of music, 100 cool sound effects, and over 2000 hi-resolution textures. But trust me, even the code is cool. It's an ultra-modular outdoor 3D engine, and it does WAY more than Battlezone or Uprising even came close to. Check out the features page. You should definitely check it out if you've ever wanted a public domain, competetive, outdoor 3D engine.

    THANKS!: Welcome. Have a happy.

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