Abuse

Abuse is a dark 2D side-scrolling platform game developed by Crack dot Com in 1995. It features beautiful lighting, realistic animation and nasty alien-like creatures to destroy. It is now maintained by Sam Hocevar in an attempt to prevent it from vanishing from the Internet.

About

Since Abuse's public domain release in 1997, the following improvements were made:

• video output uses the SDL library, with optional OpenGL rendering
• 64-bit platforms support
• lots of crashes, memory leaks and general bugs fixed
• abuse-lib, abuse-frabs and abuse-data were merged into one big dataset
• easier edition of data files using abuse-tool

See all the documentation.

There is also an artwork page and a collection of screenshots.

Plans

There is no precise roadmap yet. See the development page for information about development and the timeline to see what’s going on right now.

My current plans are:

• get network play to work again
• merge back the CTF code that was developed for Abuse Win32
• create free (as in speech) sound effects (my previous attempts at getting Bobby Prince to put them in the public domain didn’t get far)

I have no plans for 3D effects, a new game engine or complete rewrites. That would be an entirely separate project and I know I don’t have enough energy to lead such a project. But if you do, let me know, I’m willing to help.

Contact

Page maintained by ​Sam Hocevar.

Contact me if you want to help in any way: ​sam@hocevar.net

Links

Unfortunately, most Abuse resources are now dead. Here are a few worthwile links and archived pages that really deserve to be salvaged:

• ​Cypress's Abuse page, with lots of downloads including Satan Paint and additional Abuse levels
• ​Jeremy "Marauder" Scott’s page, with Abuse for Win32, Satan Paint source code and more
• ​abuse2.com archived page, again with lots of downloads
• ​fRaBs archived page
• ​Abuse-SDL archived page