Okay, Dave Taylor: Why Linux?

First, some background: Dave Taylor is president of Crack dot Com, a gaming company responsible for the side scroller Abuse and the upcoming action/strategy game Golgotha. Taylor and Crack dot Com have announced that it is going to be releasing boxed, supported versions of their games for Linux, the operating system written by Linus Torvalds.

The question remains, though: Why Linux?

"We develop our games in Linux," Taylor says, "and make a Windows version secondarily - to pay the bills, basically. In Linux, though, it's so much faster to debug code and to develop the game. I've worked on a few other Linux versions - Doom, Quake, Abuse - but those were unsupported, and the Linux versions of those games were not supported. Those old ones were all free. They were done for sh_ts and giggles, you know?

"But we have decided to market and support the Linux version of Golgotha. It's interesting...the people who use the Linux OS are generally more Internet-based than your average computer user, which should be good for a game like ours. And are generally more technically savvy than your average computer user, which we think means we won't have to deal with as many technical support calls.

"Those are some of the reasons...Linux has its Direct X equivalent. It has fast graphics and sounds. Plenty of Web servers are running on Linux - it's the best way to get performance out of an old machine. One of the big factors in Quake's initial popularity was its network play. And when Quake first came out, you saw a lot of Linux-based Quake servers being set up.

"You use the same hardware for a Linux-based game as you do for a Windows-based one. It works just fine.

"Plus, there aren't a whole lot of games made for the Linux system right now. I think a Linux-based game could sell better right now than one for the Mac OS. People who use Linux are fanatics; they're going nuts over the OS, like Amiga users were years ago, while Mac users are getting more and more frustrated by the lack of support for Mac titles, as they watch Macintosh go through its death throes."

Crack dot Com has signed with Red Hat, a company that sells a commercial version of Linux, as the publisher of the Linux-based version of Golgotha. They're shooting for a March '98 mastering date.

Taylor says that Crack dot Com is still looking for a distributor for the Windows version of the game.